Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-06-nanowrimo-revision-with-ali-fisher-length 

 

Key Points: There's no Goldilocks zone when you finish a novel. First, look at unfulfilled promises, or runaway atmosphere, and adjust those. What tells the story most effectively? Is the pacing off? Consider the master effect, what is the intended impact of the story, and do the separate elements support that? Often authors write their way into or out of a scene, and leave that extra text there. Cut it! NaNoWriMo, high-paced writing, may focus on whatever you're excited about, and leave out the parts that are harder for you to write. Take a look at filling those in! When layering, look for natural pause points. Watch for shorthand or compressed spots, which you can unpack to add emphasis or remove ambiguity. To add length, try sending them to new locations. To cut length, cut a character or a side quest. READ, review, do the easy fixes, audition (outline, then try changes on the outline), and do it! Adjust signposts and bridging material. Use narrative summary (aka summarize your darlings). Let things happen offstage, and have someone refer to it. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 06]

 

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A mini-series on revision, with Ali Fisher. Length.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

 

[DongWon] With us this week, we have a special guest, which is executive editor at Tor Publishing group, Ali Fisher. Ali acquires and edits speculative fiction and non-fiction across young adult, middle grade, and adult categories, and is, as a bonus, a cast member of the podcast Rude Tales of Magic, which is a D&D flavored comedy podcast. But really Ali's here in her capacity as an editor, and has worked on a very wide range of incredibly successful titles in speculative fiction, mostly science fiction and fantasy. Yeah, so welcome, Ali.

[Ali] Thank you. Hello, world. I am so excited to be on this podcast. Longtime listener, first time being on the podcast here. I've been listening to Writing Excuses since, I think, 2010.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Ali] Is that true? You've been doing this that long, correct?

[DongWon] I mean, next season will be year 20 soon, so, I don't remember what year we started, but… It's been a minute.

[Ali] Yeah. I… I've been listening to Writing Excuses longer than I've been in publishing. So, it's a real pleasure.

[Mary Robinette] This somehow delights me. And also makes me feel impossibly old.

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] revision, which is also something that makes me feel impossibly old when I get into it.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] We know that… We've timed this because we know that a lot of people have just finished NaNoWriMo, and you have written a novel and now you have to figure out what to do with it. So, that was why we invited Ali in, because as an editor, she has a certain understanding of what happens with novels. So, the first thing we're going to talk about is length. Because most of the projects coming out of NaNoWriMo are going to be too short. Having said that, every time I talk to someone about a novel, I always hear them say either, "Oh, yeah, I just finished this novel, but it's too long." Or, "Oh, yeah, I just finished this novel, but it's too short." I never hear anybody say, "But it's just right." There's no Goldilocks zone when you finish a novel.

[DongWon] Exactly, exactly. Even when novels come to me as an agent or when it goes to the editor or the publishing house, I feel like that is one of the first things we're talking about, that's, like, where does this fit in terms of length. So, Ali, when a project comes across your desk, when I send you an email with the most brilliant thing…

[Ali] Uhuh.

[DongWon] Attached to it…

[Ali] Of course.

[DongWon] What is your immediate reaction when you start thinking, oh, I wish this was a little bit on the shorter side, I wish this was a little bit on the longer side. What are the questions that start coming to your mind to help you figure out how to answer that?

[Ali] Yeah. Absolutely. So, working in speculative fiction, often we're sort of… We see the higher range of word count on like different novels, novellas, or whatever, because there's a lot of additional writing that sometimes takes place in those books, especially at Tor, known for door stoppers.

[Chuckles]

[Ali] A wide range, though, really. So, depending on the age group it's for, there tend to be different sort of hopes and requests coming in from retailers for their shelves and what are their assumptions of those readers' reading lengthwise. Right? Middle grade being slightly shorter. YA has really run the gamut at this point, but… With adults attending to have potentially the longest word count that I've seen. Those are very broad generalizations, but it tends to be something that is absolutely always on the table in the conversation when books come in. But that word count conversation also tends to happen after an initial read and just sort of taking stock of… There were promises that were never… That I was excited to read about, we never saw them, or there was a lot of atmosphere here, but it felt a little exploratory to your process, and I actually think that it could feel bigger if there's less in there. So, stuff like that is a little bit more… A little less like let's chop this to a really specific length, and more of a what else… What's helpful in telling this story most effectively?

[Mary Robinette] I'm really glad you said that, because one of the things that I see a lot with early career writers is that they will have internalized these rigid ideas of how long a book needs to be. Sometimes they think that they have to cut 10% when they finish a book. I think they've picked that up from Steven King. But it's not just cutting. Like, shorter is not better, longer is not better, it's the why of it, for me. Like, why are you trying to cut or expand? That helps inform the places that you're doing it. For me, length, like description, that sort of thing, has a lot to do… Has a strong relationship to pacing.

 

[DongWon] Yes. Exactly. I think sometimes when a book can feel too long, that is because the pacing is… It's too drawn out. It's not moving fast, I'm not getting pulled enough… Pulled through this as forcefully as I want to, to have like a really great reading experience. So, I think sometimes the idea is, okay, there's some fat, we can cut here. There's some extra elements that aren't quite landing with the reader for whatever reason, and if we remove those scenes, then maybe things will move on a little bit quicker. Then, sometimes, we make sure on the other side too of everything is always up to 11, it could be exhausting as a reading experience. We kind of need those breaks and those breathing points to kind of absorb character information or background information or worldbuilding, and kind of like really settle into the story in some ways. So, I think length and pacing often feel very connected.

[Ali] Definitely. It is very hard to know before you get to the stage where you have confirmed beta readers or an agent or an editor who will read your book and tell you about things like pacing and tell you their [garbled] responses to stuff like that. I'm going to bring in something from a book that I read once…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Excellent.

[Ali] Right off the bat here. There's a book called The Fiction Editor, The Novel, And the Novelist. It's very short, I think it's like 170 pages, by Thomas McCormack. I don't know much about Thomas, but he was an editor once upon a time, and he has a concept called the master effect. The concept was the master effect is the cerebral and emotional impact the author wants the book as a whole to have. It goes on to say it can be… It's sort of like it's propped up by observation and insight and emotion and experience. So, like what does this all lead to? I think, when you're looking at length, it can be helpful to look at the separate elements, as they like relate to what that big overall feeling is that you want. It can be sort of like interesting to see what inspires that feeling most, and what doesn't really add to it. Right? Especially if you're looking at like tension or something, you might find with an eye really clearly set on, "Oh, I want this to feel really tense," then you realize like, "Oh, this traveling isn't quite getting me there," or something.

 

[DongWon] It's sort of like… We were talking about word count expectations by category and genre, that the publisher wants. If it's an epic fantasy, you want it to be this length, whether that's like 100,000 or 120,000 words. If you wanted to hit with middle grade office, you want it on the shorter side. Whatever that specific range is. But those aren't… They are arbitrary and they can be very frustrating when you run into them in a rigid way. But the logic of it does come from somewhere, which is, when you're reading an epic fantasy, so much of what you want to be hearing… Experiencing is that expansiveness, is the breadth of scope and perspective, and to get a sense of the politics and the magic and those kinds of things. So you're expecting a slightly slower pace when you're coming into an epic fantasy than you would if you were coming into an adventure fantasy, which you want it to be moving a little bit at a brisker pace, getting from action scene to action scene, from tension to tension, a little bit quicker than you would when you're not having big feast scenes or big courtroom political scenes. Right? So I think a little bit of those length expectations really are driven by genre and category, because those connect to certain types of pacing and certain types of reading experiences. So if you're thinking about that, you call it the master effect? Is that what the term was?

[Ali] Yes. Yeah. Thomas called it.

[DongWon] When you're thinking about the effect that you want to have on your reader for your particular category, that's where length can really be part of the conversation coming into it.

[Mary Robinette] That's something that we're going to talk about in our next episode, where we're talking about intention. Edgar Allan Poe has a similar concept, which he calls the unity of effect, where you kind of think about what is the overall emotional goal that you're aiming for, and then everything that you put into the novel goes into that, and I think that length is one of those things that you're also manipulating as you're moving through. One of the other things that you said, Ali, at the beginning was talking about… Or maybe it was you, DongWon, talking about… Oh, I can see you've left some of your homework here. But there's another thing that I see authors do, and I've done myself a lot, which is that we don't really know where the scene is going so we write our way into it to discover it. But then all of that text is still there. So I frequently find that often the beginnings of scenes and sometimes the ends of scenes are places where the author is trying to figure out how do I get into this scene or how do I get back out of it. That you've done the thing that the scene required, and then you're kind of floundering, going like, eh, I don't… It needs a… I don't know, let's… Eh… Then there's just a lot of text where you were trying to figure out the perfect line, and then you don't cut any of it, because you don't know which pieces are actually supporting it.

[DongWon] Exactly. I think… I would love to dive into more about how you identify those and some techniques for cutting or adding, depending on where you need to do that. But let's take a quick break first, and we'll talk about the specific techniques when we come back.

 

[Ali] For my thing of the week, I wish I could pitch every book I've ever been able to work on. But, since it's 15 minutes long, and we're not that smart, I'm going to constrain myself to just the most recent publication that I had the genuine pleasure to acquire and edit. This is Infinity Alchemist by World Fantasy and National Book award winning author, Kacen Callender. Kacen is the author of Hurricane Child, King of the Dragonflies, Felix Ever after, Queen of the Conquered, and many more. Infinity Alchemist is their YA fantasy debut. It rules. It's basically dark academia burn the magic school down. In it, 3 young alchemists come together to find and then protect the rumored Book of Source before others use it for alchemist supremacy. Of course, these 3 heroes end up in a legendary love triangle, and please remember real love triangles connect on all 3 sides.

[Chuckles]

[Ali] [garbled] is clear, mostly trans, mostly POC, and polyamorous. The magic system is inspired by quantum physics, so it's very original, very cool, and available just now as of last week from Tor Teen.

 

[DongWon] As we come back from break, I would love to start digging into some of the techniques. So, say you… Coming out of NaNoWriMo, the expectation is you've written 50,000 words, and now you're sitting there thinking, "Okay, how do I make this a little bit longer?" How do I make this feel like a full novel that is ready for a fantasy reader, or ready for a YA reader, whoever it is you're trying to reach? So, how do you know where to add length? What are the points at which… How do you add to the volume of the text without slowing down your pacing too much, or disrupt or throwing off your plot structure or your character arcs or whatever it is?

[Ali] First of all, congratulations. Well done. I don't… Every time I hear about NaNoWriMo that sounds absolutely bonkers to me. That is extremely impressive. My understanding is writing at that sort of sprint pace, for a lot of people… Some people that is a very standard piece of writing, for a lot of people it is, like, pedal to the metal, tough situation. My guess is you gravitated towards like writing things you're most excited about, or, like writing towards characters if that was what you're most excited about or writing towards just the world if that was what you were most excited about, so it could well be that, like, there are full category elements that are somewhat missing, that just don't feel as instinctive or easy or smooth for you as a writer, to, like, write when you're in that zone, when you're in that kind of sprint zone. So there may be whole categories that have opportunities for lengthening.

[DongWon] That makes sense. So you're really looking at it overall and saying what are the things that I was drawn to when I was putting this together, but maybe not feeling the sort of holistic sense of I want to have this effect on my reader, here's the things I didn't put in there. I'm writing an epic fantasy and all I did was right cool battle scenes. Now I gotta go put back the court intrigue, now I have to put a romance in here, now I have to put in those character arcs that maybe aren't as fleshed out as they were when I was thinking about how to get enough words down on the page. Right? So I think that's a great place to start, I'm just feeling like where are the elements of this story that I want to be putting in that I wasn't thinking about in that moment.

[Ali] Yeah. Unless you're pitching [garbled] battle scenes, and then…

[Chuckles]

[Ali] It's just a collection of battle scenes, which sounds…

[Laughter]

[Ali] [garbled] and you should do that, but then you need 20 more battle scenes.

[DongWon] I would recommend Joe Abercrombie's The Heroes, which is basically just one battle over 3 days for the entire book. So…

[Ali] Awesome.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Ali] Very cool.

 

[Mary Robinette] So I… What I look for when I'm doing this… The kind of thing that you're talking about, the layering of… Layering in the romance element or sometimes you've written a scene and it's only dialogue and there could actually be some description… Maybe we'd like these people to be some place. So what I look for when I'm going to like layering description, for instance, is I look for natural pause points. Because when you… When you're spending words on a description, the reader has to slow down to read them. So every word you've got on the page is basically creating a pause in the readers head between one line of dialogue in the next. Which is why… Sometimes you've had the experience where you see a character answer a question and you don't remember the question that was asked. Because there's been a ton of description in between those 2 things. So I'll look for those natural pause points to put in descriptions, but also to unpack emotion. One of the other things that I find when I got a finished novel is that at the… Especially the last 3rd of the novel, I just want to be done with the novel. So I, like, shorthand every emotional experience my character is having. This is a place where you can add length by going back and unpacking the things. You don't want to unpack every emotion that the character has. You want to unpack the ones that are… Again, going with that unity of effect. So I think about it as places where I want to add emphasis or remove ambiguity, as some of the places that I'm looking at for unpacking the emotion. Is this an emotion that I want to add emphasis to, because it helps you understand the character better? Or, is this moment ambiguous? Can I give a little bit more here? Like, did I completely forget to give any physical sensation to my character experiencing an emotion?

[Ali] Totally. So, like what you're saying, it could be that at the beginning, you have a… When notable emotional experiences happen, you have the full range of… The emotion beforehand and the observation, and the tension, and then the emotion itself, and then the internal judgment on the emotion, and, like, go through the entire sort of the cycle of that. And watching then the reaction, or the dialogue that comes after it. By the end, it's like, "Uh, she was sad."

[Chuckles]

[Ali] Moving forward.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] You've read my manuscript.

[Ali] Yeah, but it works at the time. So, like, just… That's also about balancing and finding that style… Style similarities across maybe when like different… Different days felt different levels of oh, no, I have to make up for 2 days now, or whatever, that you were getting through.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the other hacks that I have for adding length is reverse engineering something that I do for short fiction where I need to compress. So, with short fiction, I try to have everything in a single location. With novels, sometimes I'm like, "Oh, I need to make this longer. Where can I send them that I haven't sent them before?" Because it will make the world feel richer. It's like, oh, reuse locations, but sometimes sending them someplace else gives me additional words that I have to write because I have to describe the new place. Again, it can make the world seem broader and richer and more interesting if I just change location of a scene.

 

[DongWon] Exactly. So, on the flipside of that, though, you've got something, it's a 200,000 word manuscript, you need it to be 110. Right? You need to cut a lot of it because it's simply too big for whatever reason. Either for the readership or even sometimes bumping up against physical limitations of publishing.

[Chuckles] [Yes]

[DongWon] It's hard to remember that we are making physical objects that we're shipping around.

[Yes]

[DongWon] And when you print more pages, it gets more expensive, and when it's heavier, it's more expensive. That can really affect things. So when, for whatever reason, your publisher is saying, "Hey. We would love this to be shorter." Or if your friends are saying that, or just your own instincts, where do you start to make those cuts? What are the things that are either easy things that you can start to look at? I mean, like, okay, across the board, I could start pulling out these scenes, or, what are the more difficult interwoven elements that you're starting to look at?

[Mary Robinette] As, apparently the only writer in the room…

[Laughter]

[Ali] But we have a lot to say.

[Mary Robinette] You have a lot to say. But I will…

[DongWon] We have a lot of opinions about how writers should do things.

[Ali] Yeah. Since you asked what's the hard part.

[Mary Robinette] You have opinions about what I should do, but I can tell you what's mechanically difficult and what's easier. The easiest way to reduce a bunch of length very fast is to cut a character or a side quest. That'll pull out a ton of length really fast. It can feel daunting when you are thinking about doing that because usually it's a… It's woven into the book all the way through. So I… What I will do is I will… I have an acronym that I use which is READ. I will review, do the easy fixes, audition, and then do it. So by audition, what I mean is that I will… If I have to do a really big at it like that, I'll reverse engineer my outline. Then I will experiment with pulling out those scenes just in outline form to see whether or not the basic flow is still there. Then, when I get into it and start the do it part of it, I put all of those into a scrap been, because I will almost certainly need pieces of them later. Then, largely what I'm doing is I'm having to adjust my signposts, which is the way I exit and enter scenes, and the material… The bridging material from getting from one thing to another. When I'm cutting things. Then, when I'm cutting characters, often it's, like, you just go in and you change the character names and then you have to tweak the dialogue to make it make sense for that character. But it's one of the fastest ways to lose a lot of length.

 

[Ali] I also think there's a… Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like, generally, out there, there's a bit of like a demonizing of narrative summary. It can really go a long way to… There are scenes that are fully dialogue, beat by beat, like this is happening, that can probably be brought down to a couple of sentences. That's like reducing your darlings, I guess. Or like…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Summarizing your darlings.

[Ali] Summarizing your darlings. Exactly.

[DongWon] I think this is where show, don't tell can lead you astray. Right? It takes so many more words to show something than to tell sometimes. So, sometimes if you have this sense of I can summarize this, I don't need to walk through every part of this group figuring out what their plan is, or having this interaction or this conversation, you can condense that into a few sentences. You can condense that into a paragraph. Provided you're making that narration interesting and still connecting it to the character. I think there are ways that you can give us very large amounts of information very quickly. And then keep moving. That can really accelerate the read in the pace of the book in a lot of good ways.

[Garbled] [go ahead]

[Ali] I was just going to say I just love what you said about auditioning. Because I think it can be very daunting and emotionally taxing to cut things that you wrote and loved. I will say as an editor, I have recommended things and been very sad about them and felt like I genuinely know I'm going to miss this. But the audition process was such a smart move. Because then you can like be really honest about whether that's going to take something away that's genuinely precious to the book, or if it's like something that was very cool, but isn't needed.

[DongWon] Because sometimes you audition and find that, oh, that was loadbearing.

[Yeah]

[DongWon] This whole thing doesn't stand up without that element. So it's like, okay, we can't touch that one. What else can we do? Unlike renovating a house, you can actually pull those out and see what happens to the whole structure.

[Ali] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to pull out a loadbearing wall under any circumstances. Unless you're like, okay, I'm going to have to pull this out, but then a beam of steel…

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] So… But when you're pulling things out, I like what you said about the show, don't tell, and the narrative summary. But the other piece that I think a lot of people underestimate when they're thinking about length is how much can happen offstage. In the gap between scenes, in the gap between chapters. You can… I found that I can cut an entire scene and just have someone refer to it having happened. That the implication is sometimes enough, if the scene was not doing anything loadbearing, aside from like one thing, that often I can just say, "Oh, yes, I see that you got the diamonds," instead of actually showing them going into the store and buying the diamonds.

[Ali] Yes.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Obviously. A thing that all of my characters do.

[Ali] So fancy.

[DongWon] I did not assume that they were buying the diamonds, when you set up that scene, but… Yeah. I mean, you can just tell us that anything happened.

[Mary Robinette] That's why you need the narrative summary.

[DongWon] Yes. Exactly. Exactly. 

 

[DongWon] Well, apropos, I suppose, for an episode about length, we're running a little bit on the long side here. So, Mary Robinette, I believe you have some homework for us.

[Mary Robinette] I do. I want you to… This is a way to play with length. You're going to find 2 scenes that… Scenes that are right next to each other. What I want you to do is I want you to remove the scene break, and then write bridging text to connect the 2 of them. So that narrative summary about how they got from point A to point B. Then I want you to find a different scene that has that bridging text, and cut it into 2 different scenes. So that you are removing it and creating new signposts, new entry and exit points to get from those 2 scenes. I want you to try that. See what it does to length, see what it does to your perception of the pacing

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go edit.

 

[Howard] We love hearing about your successes. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Tell us about it. Tell us about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-44-nanowrimo-week-1-getting-started 

 

Key Points: NaNoWriMo, writing 50,000 words. How do you get started? Writing your opening? Meet the characters and set promises for the readers. Confidence and authority, voice! And information! Promises to me, to motivate me! Voice, character, or setting. Voice driven or action driven? Hook the reader! Write a little, then ask what excites me about that. Do some freewriting, meet the character or setting or voice, before starting. [If you don't start, you can't finish.] Give readers reasons to care, to connect. Think about who, what, when, where, why, and how. Breadcrumbs, not infodumps! Character stakes, what is at risk. Where are we, who are we with, and what genre is this? Within 13 lines, what is the character's goal? Remember, Nano is a time to play, to try out things. Dive in!

 

[Season 18, Episode 44]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 1 - Getting Started.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] We're going to be talking about National Novel Writing Month. All month, in fact. For those of you who haven't participated in this, National Novel Writing Month is a month-long challenge in the month of November, where you attempt to write a novel or 50,000 words, depending on how you want to define that. So what we're going to be talking about is what you need to do in order to try to have something that's vaguely coherent at the end of the month. These are tools that you can use the rest of the time when you're working on novels or short stories, but we're going to talk this week about getting started.

[Pause]

[Erin] So, how do we do that?

[Laughter]

[Erin] I mean, it's like…

[Mary Robinette] Surely, someone else will start talking now?

[Erin] That's often the problem…

 

[Dan] Getting started is hard.

[Mary Robinette] Getting started is hard. So, in getting started, what we're talking about on day one is that you're going to be writing your opening. This is where you meet your characters and you set promises for your readers. So we're going to be talking about both stuff that you need to establish, but the order in which you establish things is very much up to you. So, what do you all find are some, like, consistent things that make an opening, like, that first page?

[DongWon] I personally really love openings. They are my favorite part of the book. As a literary agent, I'm mostly looking at openings as I'm going through queries and new projects and things like that. So, for me, the thing I'm looking for in that first page, in those opening sections, is a sense that the author knows what they're doing, and they're going to take me on a journey that I'm excited to go on with them. Right? So, projecting a certain amount of confidence and a certain amount of authority in those opening pages are really important. Some of the best tools to do this is with your actual voice. The words that you're using and the sentence structure that you have is a great way to bring readers in and project that kind of confidence that you are going to be telling us a story that we're going to be excited to read. That can be everything from word choice to sentence structure to a kind of musicality and rhythm that you have in those opening sentences. But that really needs to be balanced with all of the information that you need to give to your readers. Right? It can't all just be voice-y beautiful prose, you also need to be communicating a ton of information in those opening pages.

[Howard] I'm a sucker for a good first line. It can take a long time to write a first line that you're happy with. Often, the first week of NaNoWriMo is not a great time to grind on that.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Howard] Caveat. If the first line is good enough to excite me, the first line might be good enough to continue to excite you. So, I always try and fill my first page with things that are not just promises to the readers, but are promises to me, to get me motivated, to remind me how much fun this story's going to be.

[DongWon] Right. This is Nano. You're not here to make perfect prose, you're not here to make sure everything's super refined and edited to perfection, you're here to get words on the page. Right? So, I'm telling you this as ways to think about what your goals are for the opening, but don't stress about anything that I'm saying right now.

[Dan] Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned voice. Voice is one of the 3 things that I try to do in an opening. You don't need to do all of these 3. Really, your goal is to hook the reader and get them interested. The way I think about it, you can do that with a really great interesting voice, or with a compelling character, or with a fascinating world or setting. One of those 3 is going to grab that reader in the want to learn more about it and come on in. If you can do all 3, that's even better, but…

[DongWon] Yeah, you can only do…

[Dan] Do one of the 3.

[DongWon] Some combo of those. Right? It's not going to be pure voice. If it was pure voice, then they're like, "What is this story about? I'm out." If it… But you want to have character in their. It's sort of like you're readjusting the levels to sort of fit the story you're trying to tell.

[Mary Robinette] So, I find that what you're talking about, I see as kind of 2 different paths into a story. That you can have something that's kind of voice driven, where the voices doing all of the lifting and carrying, or you can have something that's action driven, where the character is in the middle of doing something. That… There's overlap between those 2 things. Like, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, nobody is doing anything. It's all voice driven. Whereas, if you look at the beginning of Ghost Talkers, using my own novel, that begins with a character saying, "The Germans were flanking us at Delville Wood when I died." Ginger Stuyvesant was sitting with the spirit circle… I don't remember the rest of my actual lines…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But she's in the middle of doing something. But it is that hook, that both of these have different ways of hooking the reader and pulling them in.

 

[Erin] I would say that you may not know which of these you're doing because it is Nano and you're just trying to figure it out. So one thing that I find really fun during Nano is to write a little bit of a beginning and then go like, "What could this be? What excites me about it? Like, what about the voice that I've just written is really interesting? What about the action that's happening is really intriguing?" It's a great way later in the month if you get stuck to go back and look at what are 2 or 3 things that I was really excited about, like Howard said, right at the start, that can continue to motivate me when I'm not sure, like, where I went or how the story has taken a twist or a turn.

[Dan] Well. One thing that I do, and I've talked about this on the show before, but I still do it, and I still think it's valuable, is I will do free writing before I start a book. I will write some dialogue, let a character talk for a couple of pages. Or I will describe the world. I will describe my favorite aspects of the world, the part of the setting that gets me excited. I will try to write something and nail down a tone of voice, or find a weird turn of phrase. Never intending to actually use any of this in the novel, but just to kind of get me into the right headspace so I can hit the ground running when the actual writing starts.

[Mary Robinette] I do something similar, that I will often do a couple of exploratory attempts. Sometimes I am planning for it to be the first chapter, but it's just me saying, "What is this? What is going on here?" Much like Erin does, also. It's just like is there something here that excites me? For those of you who are doing NaNoWriMo seriously, all of these exploratory attempts count towards your total word count.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Save them. No writing is wasted.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things about Nano is that it really teaches you that no writing is wasted. When we come back from our break, what were going to be talking about are some of the pieces of information that you're going to need to pass to your reader. But, right now, let's take a brief break.

 

[Mary Robinette] NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and it's time to start planning. If you're aiming for 1600 words a day, it's easy to de-prioritize eating. But you need to keep the brain fueled. During Nano, I turn to meal kits. Hello Fresh makes whipping up a home-cooked meal a nice break from writing with quick and easy options, including their 15 minute meals. With everything pre-proportioned and delivered right to your door every week, it takes way less time than it takes to get a delivery. I find that stepping away from the keyboard to cook gives my brain time to rest. I love that with Hello Fresh, I can plan my meals for the month before NaNoWriMo begins, and then, I can save all of my decision-making for the story. With so many in season ingredients, you'll taste all the freshness of fall in every bite of Hello Fresh chef crafted recipes. Produce travels from the farm to your door for peak freshness you can taste. Go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use the code 50WX for 50% off plus free shipping! Yeah, that's right. 50WX, 50 for 50% off and WX for Writing eXcuses. We are terrible with puns. Just visit hellofresh.com/50WX and try America's number one meal kit.

 

[Howard] It's the first week of NaNoWriMo. It is time to get started. I'm going to throw a couple of aphorisms at you. You must be present to win. You miss 100% of the pitches you don't swing at. [Sigh] If you don't start, you'll never get to finish. I speak as someone who has never actually won at NaNoWriMo. I've started it several times. I think one time, I actually got 30,000 words in on a project. But I've never actually completed something that I would consider to be a first draft of a novel during NaNoWriMo. Do I feel bad about it? No. Do I feel in the least bit conflicted about encouraging you to start NaNoWriMo? Absolutely not. I am giving you permission to start and maybe fail. Because that happens to the best of us. I don't want to suggest that I'm the best of us. There are way better than me who have failed at NaNoWriMo. But you miss 100% of the pitches you don't swing at. Sit down at the keyboard and write something. Let the words flow, or let the words don't flow. Because until you try it, you won't know whether or not you can do it. [Sigh] I've heard it said that the limitations that affect most people are what they believe their limitations to be, rather than what their limitations actually are. So, whether or not you think you can finish NaNoWriMo, I think you should start.

 

[Mary Robinette] Right. So. Now that we're back, what I'd like us to talk about is some of the information that you want to try to get to the reader early, early in your novel or short story. One of the reasons you want to do that is that part of the promises in all of those things is that you're giving the reader reasons to care and to connect. Readers are desperately trying to ground themselves at the beginning, and they will grab hold of any piece of information that you give them and begin to build a world. So you want to make sure that you are giving them information in order to build that world in their head.

[DongWon] One of the biggest mistakes I see in openings is not giving enough information. Right? A lack of information density can make for an opening that feels incredibly slow. It's just not pulling me into the world. It's not giving me information about the character and not giving me a sense of what the shape of the story is going to be. So, the way I always talk about opening pages is I want them to be like a layer cake. Right? Where there's so much stuff put into those opening pages that are giving me a sense of world and character and all these things. So one way to do that is to kind of play with your voice a little bit and play with time and interiority and perspective to be able to give us lots of different pieces of information from lots of different angles as quickly as possible.

[Erin] Sometimes I actually like to think about this is literally the who, what, when, where, why, and how. Like, these are the things that your reader's going to want to know in the beginning. You don't have to give them all in one sentence. Though, if you can, that's exciting. But, really, I like to think about when am I answering like, who. Who is this happening to? What. Like, what is actually going on at this moment? When and where is our setting. Like, when and where are we? Then, for why and how, how is a lot of tone. Like, how is this story going to be told? Is this humor, is this a light touch, is this like dark and foreboding? Like, how is the story being told? Why is a little bit of sort of the if there's any theme that I want to put in there, that I want to seed early on. Sometimes, I'll actually go through the pages of a story and be like when our each of these elements clear? If one is clear very, very far down, then, am I doing that for a reason? If I'm not, can I bring it up, and at least suggest what's going on so that it doesn't feel missing?

[Howard] On that point, or to that point, I love the idea of descriptions as being either additive or corrective. I see corrective as inherently problematic. If I've given you some description, you're going to start building independently of me continuing to write things. If I lead you in one direction and you keep running in that direction, but that's not what is actually happening, the next piece of description I give you is corrective instead of additive. Every time you do that, you are breaking a trust with the reader. Now, in a humor novel, you can absolutely get away with it. In fact, it's a fantastic technique. But, I started thinking about it in this way, where, yes, I want to order things, the who, what, when, where, why, but I also want to make sure that if I start people down a path, I don't let them run far enough that I have to correct my description later.

[Dan] I think it's important to point out… We don't want to freak you out with this thought that you have to explain everything in your first couple of pages. That's not what we're talking about. Think of it as providing evidence of what's going on, rather than providing us answers for what's going on. You don't need to explain your entire magic system, for example. But you do need to give us the information that pertains to the scene itself. If your first scene is a fight between wizards, then, yeah, we need to understand some of the magic system. If it's not, you can just drop hints here and there, give us some breadcrumbs, and explain the rest of it later.

[DongWon] One thing I always say is that I need character stakes in the opening scene, I need some sense of, like, what's at risk here. The other thing I always say is these can be lies.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] This goes a little counter to what Howard was saying, but this doesn't have to be your main character's biggest problem. This can be a minor set of stakes that they need to get through for this scene, that will then lead them into bigger inciting incidents. Right? So, I need a sense of the shape of the story. Don't feel pressured to communicate your whole novel to me in this moment. I just need a story, a subplot, a little something for me to chew on that's going to pull me into the rest of the book.

[Howard] Coming back to additive versus corrective real quick. If you tell me someone is desperately trying to get a hold of someone else, but can't, and you don't tell me why, I… Well, if you tell me because my cell phone has no charge, then you grounded me in the 21st-century. If you tell me that I can't get to a pay phone, whatever, then you grounded me maybe a couple decades earlier. Or smoke signals or whatever. I need to know if we're in Civil War era or 21st century fairly early on with the descriptions end up being very, very corrective when you deliver them.

[DongWon] This brings me to one another point is to be a little careful of metaphor in these opening pages. Because everything… I don't know anything about your world, so sometimes somebody… I'll run [inaudible into fantasy?] where somebody puts a metaphor in and I'll think, "Oh, literally, people are fish in this world." Not they were like a fish in this moment.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] You know what I mean? You can take stuff that is completely wild because I am… It's all open skies for me. I don't know what it is I'm engaging with yet. So, those metaphors can be taken incredibly literally in those opening pages. So, something to be a little careful about.

[Mary Robinette] I… I… I'm going to give like some metrics for a really mechanical way to do this. For people who like rules and are feeling freaked out. I want to be really clear that this is exercise stuff, this is not books must be written this way. But if you're like, "I don't know, this is too much." Using Erin's idea of who, what, where, why, I do something very similar. That is, I try to make sure that my character's… My readers know where we are, who we're with, and something about the genre or mood. I count when as part of the where. I try to do that within the first 3 sentences. So that I'm just like giving… And it's not that… When I say who, it's not that you have to know my character's entire back story. It's just giving a little bit of an idea of whose eyes we're going to be looking through, who we're going to be connecting to. Then, within the first 13 lines, I try to make sure that we know something about my character's goal. The reason I say the first 13 lines is an entirely mechanical and mercenary thing, which is that it's about the first half page of a manuscript, and that's about how long you have to hook an agent or an editor when they are in the slush pile. So if you can give them something that your reader… Your character wants. To DongWon's point, it doesn't have to be the big thing, but something that's, like, somehow thematically linked. Like, if we're going to be on a big quest later, they're just looking for the remote control right now. But something that they want.

[Erin] Let's say 2 things about that. One is that I think those small things, like looking for the remote control, build the trust that Howard was talking about earlier. You show that, like, I'm going to show you something and I'm going to deliver on it. Then you don't have to deliver on it as quickly the next time, because you've built that trust. But also, to be like a chaos gremlin…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Like, in opposition of what you're saying, I also feel like one of the things that's nice about Nano, it's, like, a time to play around and find out what…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Surely.

[Erin] And find out what happens if you break all these rules. Do you want to write 50,000 words where no one knows where they are the entire time, including the reader? Hey, go for it. You may find out that you've discovered a new way of writing fiction, or you may find out that it's confusing and you need to go back and add that in. But this is a great time too, like, play around with what you're doing and how you're doing it.

[Mary Robinette] I actually completely agree with that. So we're in great shape. And, I think, that we've set you up to begin your first nano day. Hopefully. So, dive in. All of the words you count write.… All of the words you write count! Now, we're going to give you a little bit of homework.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, your homework assignment is that I want you to write 2 different openings. The first one is going to be more action driven, where your character is doing a thing. The 2nd one is going to be voice driven, where you are ruminating on something and kind of just exploring voice. You may wind up using neither of these, both of them count. You can do them in any order you want. But explore 2 different ways of opening that novel.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

[Mary Robinette] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We're now offering an introductory tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/12/11/17-50-consistency-inconsistency-and-the-crushing-weight-of-expectations/

 

Key Points: What does your audience expect, when can they rely on you to provide new content, and what commitments have we, as creators, made to the audience? Seasons and breaks, or a never-ending juggernaut? Focus on regularity or focus on content? Under-promise and over-deliver. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 50]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Consistency, Inconsistency, And the Crushing Weight of Expectations. 15 minutes long.

[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

 

[Howard] This episode was my idea. Because today is December 3… Is it December third?

[Dan] It is.

[Dongwon] It is December third.

[Howard] It's December third. Wow, look at that. We're recording this on December 3 for December 11 because we realized we had a hole in our schedule of episodes. We could not let that stand. Then we took a step backward and had to ask, well, why not? What was our original commitment to publishing an episode every week without fail? I'm actually going to throw this question to Dan. Dan, do you remember 2008? Do you remember back then when we decided how often we were going to do this?

[Dan] I have [garbled] memories of 2008. I don't remember if there was a specific decision made other than if we're going to do it weekly, let's make sure we do it every single week.

[Howard] Yeah. See, that was my memory as well. That was a 2008… I guess it was the only 2008 any of us got. But back then, I was eight years in on what would become a 20 year run of Schlock Mercenary where the daily web comic updated every day without fail. That was a thing that, and I'm not mincing any words here, made me feel important and special. So I thought it was something that we should do with our podcast as well. So we have inherited that. Here it is 2022, very nearly 2023, and we are still insisting on putting this stuff out every week. Now, fair listener, we're not recording this episode in order to tell you that we're going to change that. We're going to explore how the crushing weight of your expectations drove this recording session and what the alternatives might be for those of you who publish newsletters or do other sorts of social media things, Patreons, whatever else. Let me throw it out to the august body of two…

[Dan] I just want to say really quick that us doing an episode about how we never miss an episode kind of feels like the radio station constantly interrupting songs to tell you how they never interrupt the songs…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Yeah. Yeah. There's… For my pitch to this episode originally to Dongwon, I said, "Oo, oo, I have a silly meta-meta-idea."

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Dan, it's important to let them know what they're getting and so you need to remind them of what it is we're doing here.

[Howard] It is.

 

[Dongwon] Howard, question for you, actually. Is your streak completely unbroken? Are you at 20 years of not missing a single day?

[Howard] Yes. 20 years from June 12 of 2000 was the first strip through July 20 of 2020 was the final strip. Every day has a strip on it, and all of those strips aired on the day which they were scheduled. There was this one time where the strip aired about eight hours late because a universal… Err, uninterruptible power supply in the server farms was configured incorrectly and power cut out and the generator didn't come on and then the UPS exploded. We had to move to another host. I think that was in 06. That was the point at which everybody just insisted I was metal and I couldn't be stopped. When, in point of fact, that was I know people who can solve the technical problems and I have a buffer.

[Dongwon] How stressful has that been for you? Like, what does that feel like to know that every day I got to get this out? I mean, obviously, you're banking some, those are in the bank in advance, but what's that process felt like?

[Howard] It's like… I couldn't have accurately described it until I was out the other side of it. You ask a fish what water taste like, and they're like, "What? What does the world taste like?" No. I am now like the fish who has crawled out onto dry land. I'm like, "Hm. Water was nice. Air is different."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There was a constant pressure, but it was also a piece of what I used to motivate me, to get me moving. The idea that a strip, that a day could go by without a strip was just absolutely unthinkable to me. Because I knew that if I missed one day, then it would be okay, and I would just start missing days over and over and over again.

[Dongwon] Right.

[Howard] So… But that's me. That's… I don't want to project that mindset on to other people. That's where… With this whole discussion, we have to be careful.

 

[Dan] Well, that's what I want to bring up next, is… I honestly, despite doing two of them, I don't listen to a ton of podcasts. So is never missing a week, is that actually a rare thing? Or does everyone do that?

[Dongwon] I think, as one who listens to an insane amount of podcasts, it depends on the podcast. There are many that I follow that are religious about weekend, week out. Then there are some who are like, "Yeah, we missed four or five over the course of our several year run." Then there are some who update irregularly, and you just get new content when you get new content. I think one way that podcasters sort of get around the burnout component is by bundling them into seasons. Right? So we'll do 10 episodes weekly, and then take a break for two months while they prep the next season, and then come back for another 10 episodes. I think that's a way to sort of manage that schedule and manage expectations because really that's what it comes down to. So much of what this is what does your audience expect, when can they rely on you to be providing new content, and what commitments have we, as creators, made to that audience.

[Howard] Yeah. With some of the more produced… Produced is the wrong word, and I don't want to put a negative connotation on it. The more heavily produced… The higher production value podcasts run a lot like television seasons would run, which is, hey, we're going to do a run of a couple of dozen episodes, and then we take a break. During that break, what is happening is we are arranging for the sponsors and the ads and the content and whatever else for the next season. That's… When you've got five or 25 people working on a thing, that makes a lot more sense than insisting that this is a weekly juggernaut that just never stops rolling and outputting a thing.

[Dongwon] Well, so much of the advice for authors these days, is integrate multiple touch points for the audience. Right? So, you have your books, but then you're also maybe you have a podcast, maybe your Patreon, a substack, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. All these are ways in which you're interacting with your audience on a regular basis. So I think the reason I found this topic interesting was what's the logic behind how you structure that, how do you approach that, how do you manage your own burnout and audience expectations at the same time.

 

[Howard] Yeah. On the subject of authors, we should have a book of the week. Dan, did you bring us… Did you bring one?

[Dan] I did bring a book of the week. So, I am a big fan of Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. She has a relatively new one, I think it's a month or so old, called The Daughter of Dr. Moreau. Which is a retelling of The Island of Dr. Moreau, set in the Yucatán Peninsula in the either early 1900s or late 1800s. I'm not deep enough into it to know exactly where. But Sylvia writes a very distinct subset subgenre that I adore. Which is historical Mexican feminist horror. If you're into that, she is so good. Her… Last year, she put out one called Mexican Gothic which was a haunted house story. This one is much more kind of that H. G. Wells Dr. Moreau thing, but all from the point of view of this daughter, transplanted from France, growing up in the Yucatán Peninsula, raised by a Mayan nanny. Then, at the center of this giant culture clash, written with this delightful core science-fiction element on top of it. It's really good stuff. I'm not done with it yet, like I said, but it's fantastic, and I recommend it. So that is The Daughter of Dr. Moreau by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia.

[Dongwon] That's tremendously exciting. Mexican Gothic was really one of my favorite reads last year.

[Dan] Oh, it was so good.

[Dongwon] Just terrific.

[Dan] This one, thus far, I'm liking even more.

 

[Howard] That's… It's cool, and I love the way you described… And I'm going to make a point out of this… When you said the genres. Name those off again.

[Dan] Historical Mexican horror.

[Howard] Okay. Historical Mexican horror. One of the things that's fun about following authors on social media is that discovery that if you like, for instance, horror, branching into a historical horror is not a big stretch. You start seeing some of these overlaps. If you like historical, branching into Mexican and horror at the same time, that is not a big stretch. So, yeah, when you say Mexican historical horror, if you are into that thing, no, if you are into any of those things, there's a really good chance that you're going to like this new thing. This is one of the reasons why having some sort of presence on social media or whatever is useful to us so that we can find those places where we overlap with people's existing interests and say, "Oh, well, you know, you liked The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you might actually like Schlock Mercenary. It's not a book, and it's not British, and it has pictures, and it's not as funny, but…"

[Chuckles]

[Dan] There are enough parallels.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I think with the social media component, like having sort of these regular contact points like I was talking about earlier is… Can be really, really important. Right? I think having the daily updates, the regular updates, that you were talking about from Schlock Mercenary. I think the basic advice for Instagram is, like, post a reel a day. Right? For TikTok, it's like regular… Make sure you're regularly updating your content. That can be really important. But that can also create an enormous amount of pressure on creators. I think it holds a lot of people back from even trying to start to build their brand that way. I launched a newsletter a few years back, it's called Publishing Is Hard. I really love doing it. One thing that I decided before I launched it was I'm not going to commit to a regular schedule. Because I know me. I know what my life is like, I know how much work I have on my plate at any given time, and, as a literary agent, the amount of work that I do goes up and down wildly. One week will be completely insane, the next week will be quiet. Right? So it just wasn't realistic for me to make a commitment of I'm going to send a newsletter every week. Now, my colleague Kate McKean also has a brilliant newsletter called Agents And Books. She does two newsletters a week. Right? We both have different audiences, different strategies, different approaches, and it's really cool to see what she does and what I do slightly different because I, at the beginning said, "I'm going to send these irregularly." When I first created it, it was in sort of the copy that I made. Anybody who has followed it has known that there will be periods where you won't hear from me for a minute, but then I'll send a new one out. The balance is you can sort of focus on regularity of getting the piece of content out, and it's usually a little bit shorter, it's a little bit more pointed, or, what I do, is make sure that what I'm giving somebody… I'm trying to make sure every piece is pretty special to the audience. Right? I'm putting a lot of care and craft into what I'm writing. Not that you don't for a daily update, but I'm giving something a little bit more emotional, I think, then what my colleague Kate does. Right? So I think finding that balance point between okay, if I'm not doing a weekly update, what am I offering my audience that sort of makes up for the lack of regularity in a way that balances it out for them.

[Howard] Yeah. To be sure here, if we had decided that Writing Excuses was going to be a 30 minute episode instead of a 15 minute episode, the weekly schedule would have crushed us.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] Because the recording sessions, we just wouldn't have had enough time to do the things that we wanted to do.

[Dongwon] Yeah. Those people who do like weekly three hour podcasts? Unimaginable, to me, how they do that. I mean, it's just a bigger part of their lives. I think we all have primary things that we're doing that are incredibly time-consuming. So we can fit in these 15 minute a week episodes. Which is, just, again, a really different balance point.

 

[Howard] Dongwon, you talked about how the crushing expectations can prevent people from even getting started. For a while, I had a twitch stream… I still have technically, a twitch stream, I just haven't streamed in forever. A twitch stream in which the art that I was doing for the X DM books was showing up as part of the stream. Then something happened, I don't remember exactly what it was, but I realized the effort of configuring things so that I can stream this is preventing me from getting the work done. The stress of having an audience in front of me is preventing me from doing the really hard work where I have to be unafraid of making mistakes. I'm just not comfortable doing that on stream. Which is weird to hear from the guy whose 20… Or whose year 2000 artwork is available for everybody to look at. But, long story short, I stopped streaming and started getting the work done. So, yeah, the decision to create regular content can be a decision that results in less productivity. That's not what any of us want.

[Yeah]

[Dan] Well, I'm glad you brought that up because one of the points I want to make here is this is not an episode about how you should start a podcast.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Or about how you should have a TikTok. Right? We are not telling you that any of these outlets are necessary for an artist's career. What we're trying to get across is the idea that you need to look at your own output, at your own schedule, decide for yourself if one of these extra peripheral activities might be valuable to you, and then see what would be the best format to stick that into. If you want to do a podcast, you want to do a quick and dirty weekly one like we're doing, you want to do something longer and research that comes out in discrete chunks once a year, how do you want to structure that? Maybe the answer is nothing at all. All three of us used to be on Typecast which ran for about three years with different cast members here and there. We really worked hard to make that a weekly thing as consistent as possible. It wasn't always. Eventually, we had to let go of it because our schedules became such that it was not worth our time anymore. Sometimes that happens.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I think an important point here…

[Howard] I still miss it.

[Dongwon] I do miss it too, actually. Yeah, it was fun. If I have any point here, it's… Yeah, don't feel like you have to do these things. If you do do it though, if you're thinking about it, don't be afraid to experiment. Right? Don't feel like just because most or some newsletters are weekly, that this is a thing that you're tying yourself to, but you're going to have to do every week. I think that expectation can actually limit you more than open things up. Right? So, don't be afraid to experiment, try new things, and don't feel like you have to do the one piece of advice that you've heard elsewhere. You can do in a regular schedule. My only advice is as you do that, to under-promise and over-deliver. If you're not sure you can do weekly, don't tell people upfront you're doing weekly. Right? Just say, "I'm trying this out, this is an experiment, let's see how it goes." Right? I'm currently launching a monthly twitch stream and I've said many times, this is experimental. We're trying this out. I'm trying to figure out how do I do scheduling, how do I coordinate this, how do I get guests on. All of this stuff. It's been super fun so far, pretty easy so far. But we'll see where I'm at in six months. So, just make sure that you're being realistic with yourself and realistic with your audience. Because where this goes wrong is when people feel really misled. Right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Dongwon] There have been times where I've under-promised and under-delivered. Right? Like, that happens. But I think if you have that relation with the audience, you can work with them and sort of make it up to them and find a way to balance that out.

[Dan] Yeah.

 

[Howard] If you take away anything from this episode, under-promise, over-deliver. That's your soundbite. Thank you, Dongwon.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's a very good one.

[Dongwon] You're welcome. Words to live by.

 

[Dan] Let me throw out one more thing that I've learned with my newsletter. Which I do try to send out regularly. But regularly for me use… It is not tied to a day of the week or a day of the month. I try to do a monthly newsletter, but it is more important for me to get it out on a Monday than it is to get it out on the first Monday of the month. Just because I know that that is the time when it is most likely to be seen and clicked on. So that's a different kind of consistency, and a different kind of schedule keeping to keep in mind.

 

[Howard] Yep. Hey, Dongwon, you want to send us home with some homework?

[Dongwon] Yeah. So, here's what I'd like all of you to do. Make a list of all of your regular commitments, the stuff that you're obligated to do every week. Whether that's going to therapy, picking up your kids, whatever it is that you have that is a regular thing. Put that on the list somewhere. Then, once you have all of that together, consider your bandwidth for adding new items to that list. Is that a daily Instagram post? Is that a weekly TikTok? Is that a newsletter? Is that this, is that another thing? Really think about what do I actually have time for. Then make a rough schedule of what content updates you could do in a sample month. Right? What feels realistic, what feels manageable. Then reduce that by a little bit. Right, in that under-promise kind of component. Right? Think about what feels realistic now, and then realize that you're probably not going to hit that target. What's a little bit under that that you could shoot for. Yeah. I think that's a good place to get started in terms of putting together a content plan for yourself.

[Howard] Outstanding. That's… It almost sounds like a life hack. Hey, I think we did it. I think we filled our December 11 hole.

[Dan] Yay!

[Howard] So. Fair listeners, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/02/06/17-6-hitting-reset-without-getting-hit-back/

 

Key points: How do you reset expectations, break old promises and make new ones, without breaking the trust of the audience? Deliver something different and amazing! Yes-and, keep the old promises and make new ones. No-but, break the old ones, but give them a different wonderful experience. Oh, crap. I broke it, and I don't know how to fix it. Dash through the red paint and hope no one notices. Telegraph the change as much as you can, and accept that you may lose some audience. Long-running shows often do a reset during season breaks. Give them a big moment of character change instead of the big climax they expected. And a Big Can of Worms for resetting your career... 

 

[Season 17, Episode 6]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Hitting Reset Without Getting Hit Back.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

 

[Howard] We are talking about resetting expectations. We are talking about breaking promises and then making new ones without actually betraying the trust of the audience. I'm trying to think of a good example of this. It's possible that the good example may be Million-Dollar Baby…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Which breaks a promise to the audience, this is a sports movie, by giving us 1/3 act that shows that it's actually a drama about euthanasia, about… It's very dramatic and it's not very sports movie. As we pointed out when we mentioned it earlier, it's got a 90% fresh rating from critics and audiences over at Rotten Tomatoes. Maybe part of this is because it's 15 years old. But it won a lot of awards and it did great grossing in theaters. It was something which broke promises that audiences felt had been made to them, and then delivered something different, but delivered it so well that the majority of the audiences put up with it, they accepted it. They loved it, they came out of the theater… I don't want to say happy, but having experienced something amazing, which is what the filmmaker set out to do. So let's talk about that. What are some examples of things where you feel like the expectations have had to be reset and they did it well?

 

[Kaela] Well, I think that, personally, for me, there are two main movies that come to mind for this. One is Kung Fu Panda Two, which is one of my favorite movies ever, and How to Train Your Dragon, for different reasons, but both of them playing with expectations. I think Kung Fu Panda Two does multiple things with your expectations. For one, it kind of gives you an origin story again, except it's deeper, it's bigger, it's… You're like, "Whoa, I didn't think I was going to get this from a Kung Fu Panda franchise."

[Laughter]

[Kaela] So I think that's the other thing is, tonally, it's a lot harder, it's a lot… It's more explorative of pain, of destruction, of trauma, of working out issues like… Heavier themes than the first one. Like, the first one had a good heart still, but the second one just really dives in there in a way that you wouldn't have expected. But at the same time, I was not like, "Why is my fun movie sad?" when I watched it. I was like, "Oh, my gosh, they do a great job of acclimatizing you." They start out fun and everything too, but they do a good job of acclimatizing you to this is going to be a bit heavier of a movie. It's still going to be an amazing adventure, but it's going to be more emotionally in-depth than the first one without losing you. I don't know anybody who was lost with Kung Fu Panda Two. I think… I know most people just sat there stunned and in awe instead. Not disappointed.

[Howard] Yeah. I was kind of slack-jawed. I was, "Wait. How did they do that?" Usually, the origin story has to come first, and the two movie is a raising of stakes and a new adventure. But you managed to raise the stakes and give me a new adventure and give me an origin story and it's… Wow. It seems to defy… It seemed to defy the number two.

[Kaela] Yeah.

[Howard] Which was pretty cool. Meg?

 

[Megan] I actually have an example of something that did it badly, that raised my expectations and then turned it on its head.

[Howard] Okay.

[Megan] It's the anime Attack on Titan. Which is about humanity fighting to survive when they are constantly attacked by huge giants who are referred to as Titans. We have are very strong protagonist character who's going to get revenge on all the Titans and he's going to save the world. They kill him off, seven episodes in. I was like, "Amazing. I love this. Now his meek sidekick character is going to have to step into his shoes and become the new protagonist and…" No. Protagonist came back, magically, and with magic powers.

[Chuckles]

[Megan] And is so magical now. I was like, "Man. I mean, that's cooler now, but… I wish he'd died."

[Laughter]

[You want a ghost?]

[Howard] Why couldn't you stay dead?

 

[Howard] As I categorized these in our outline, I talk about yes-and, which is a raising of expectations, making new promises while keeping old ones. I feel like yes-and is the easiest expectation reset. Because really, all you're doing is raising the bar. It's not like you've broken promises. No-but is the next one, and that's the actual reset where you had to make promises by breaking earlier ones. Yes, I know I promised you a sports movie, but I'm going to give you an amazing cinematic experience that's going to touch your soul and you wouldn't have come out to the theater to watch this anyway, but it's important and, thank you, everybody, and I'll take my Oscar now. I may be projecting a little bit. The third category is what I call oh, crap. It's the one where I felt like I most often lived in Schlock Mercenary, which is the discovery that you've broken a promise but only after it's too late to fix things. I foreshadowed something and got the technology wrong. Oh, crap. Oh, I can't actually make that work, what do I do instead? So in these three categories, what are our strategies?

[Sandra] I remember watching… Oh, it was decades ago, the making of Indiana Jones. A documentary. So it was like one hour long, the making of show. Listening to Steven Spielberg talk about how when they're writing the scripts, they would actually literally paint themselves into a corner. The opening sequence, Indiana Jones has just run from the boulder, tumbled out, and now he is standing trapped, facing a circle of spears, and there is literally no way to get out. Spielberg basically says, "Well, what you do when you've painted yourself into a corner is quickly duck and dash your way through the red paint and hope that nobody notices the footprints."

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Which is pretty much what that movie does. There may be better tools for this, but honestly, I think of like the Pirates of the Caribbean, I think it's 5, that begins with we're dragging an entire building through the middle of town using a horse-drawn cart.

[Howard] Yes.

[Sandra] It is absolutely completely and totally ridiculous, but basically what it's saying is, "This is the movie you're getting. If you're not on board, just go ahead and leave the theater now." So if you have to reset, any time you have to reset expectations, you're going to lose some audience, you're going to shed some audience who don't make the turn with you. That's just normal and expected. If you need to make the turn, make the turn anyway. Telegraph it is much as you can, so that people are ready for that moment. Okay, we all need to lean to the right. Lean to the right so we can make this turn, and… Now the wheels are back on the ground and we can keep going.

[Howard] There were a lot of turns in that scene where they were dragging the…

[Sandra] The whole building.

[Howard] The bank through the village, and, as I recall, they lost all of the money.

[Sandra] They lost the entire building.

[Howard] In the course of doing that. Yeah. Nice. Good choice of scenes. Nice metaphor. Well played. Bravo.

 

[Megan] There's something, especially in long-running television series, where, in between seasons, they will reset. So it's always sad sometimes when they come back into a season and these characters are now gone, and, oh, no, the set where they spent all their time, that's different now, they're going to spend all their time here instead. Sometimes writers rooms will literally just reset the world and which characters we have and we just never mention it.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Yeah. That becomes part of the expectation of watching a long-running show. You just kind of know that there's going to be a reset. A…

[Howard] Sorry. Let me interrupt you there. That's the experience of someone who has watched lots of long-running shows.

[Sandra] Right.

[Howard] There are plenty of people who watch a long-running show for the first time and as those things happen, they're like, "No!"

[Yeah]

[Howard] No. Because they feel like they've been betrayed.

[Sandra] An excellent reset to examine is the movie Serenity versus the TV show Firefly. Because you have this TV show that only ran for a very short time and then was canceled. Then you have this gap of time. Then they make a movie. In order to… Which is actually a jump in media. It's… A movie is a different medium than a TV show. Which meant that there are different expectations, different language you can use, and in order to make that shift, they had to do some reset. The one that I… That jarred me the most, was that by the end of the run of the show, the doctor character had kind of become reconciled with the captain character as we're a family. When they start the movie, there's a lot more friction between them and it's more like the beginning of the show than the end of the show. They had to do that reset in order to give the proper arcs to the movie, because the movie had to be able to stand alone as well. So, it jarred me, as a watcher of the show, but once I was like, "Eh," it was not so jarring that I was knocked out and walked away. I was like, "Eh, I don't like that, but… Okay. Take me along for this ride." So…

 

[Megan] As an example for the no-but resetting expectations, Avatar the Last Airbender did that to me in, like, the third season. Like, the day of black sun. Because they really built up to it. I was watching this is a kid at the time, about 13-ish. I was like, "It's finally happening." We've had seasons building up to this day, they really built up to it in those moments, too, where they're like, "We're really… This is the day we lay siege on the Fire Nation." It's the eclipse that we risked all our lives to find information about in the previous seasons. This is it. It's a two-parter, and everything, so I was like, "Oh, this is finally going down. We're going to take down the Fire Nation." And it doesn't. It does not pan out. They fail the invasion. Because they already knew and were already ready and just gone. They're shocked and terrified, and I was too. I was like, "What?" But what they did was a great job in that, because otherwise it could of felt like really deflative, where you're like, "Well, great. Okay, but what did we spend all this time for, then?" But what they give you is a bunch of other things that you really wanted and needed, like, most particularly, the Zuko storyline carries out the days of black sun two parts. Having Zuko come in and that's the moment where he decides to defect from the Fire Nation and healthy avatars make his new plan to take down his dad. Like, that ends up making the story worthwhile. So, no, I didn't get like the big climax that I was really prepared for, but I got Zuko's storyline intersecting finally and his big moment of character change.

[Howard] You can argue that we set out to defeat the Fire Nation, and we got the victory we didn't expect, which was turning Zuko.

[Megan] Yeah.

[Howard] So, you can make the argument that you actually fulfilled the promise. I think that's part of how you make no-but work is that you take the new thing that you hand them and say, "By the way, this actually fulfills all of your other expectations." Trust… I'm just going to paint it red so that it looks like what you were…

[Giggles]

[Howard] Yeah. [Garbled a neat] trick.

 

[Howard] We need to have a book of the week. Or a thing of the week. I think Meg's got it.

[Megan] I have a thing of the week that also ties up a lot of the things that we've been talking about in all of the other episodes. This is a Korean drama that I originally watched on WB's drama streaming service, which no longer exists. But you can purchase the show on DVD which I have. The show is called Circle: The Two Worlds or Circle: the Connected Worlds depending on your translation. But every episode is two completely different stories. The first half of the episode takes place in 2017, the other half takes place in the far future. The 2017 story is about these twin brothers who are going to university and there's some strange things going on and they're investigating it. It's a smaller story about brothers investigating a mystery. The future story is high sci-fi, and there's this town where you can only live if there's a chip implanted in your brain that regulates your emotions and there's no pain and no fear and there's no crime. It's about a police detective who is trying to investigate an alleged murder that's happened inside the perfect city. But the guards won't let him in. But it turns out he has a second motive to get in there. He believes there's evidence about two twin brothers who disappeared back in 2017. It's these two completely different stories, completely different genres, and you've got expectations set up for how these kinds of stories work. It's slowly about how these two storylines tie back into each other and influence each other. Circle: the Connected Worlds.

[Sounds cool]

[Howard] That sounds really cool, and I wish I had it on a streaming service right now.

[Megan] Howard, I have my DVDs here in Utah. They could end up at your house on accident or purpose at some point in time.

[Whew!]

[Howard] Well, see now you're making all of our listeners terribly, terribly jealous…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Which just doesn't seem like a fair thing to do.

 

[Howard] Early on in Schlock Mercenary, I was writing… I mean, the design principles for Schlock Mercenary were I am not making fun of science fiction in my science fiction comic, the comedy will come from other things. But it was very newspaper humor, dad joke type stuff. Would have fit right in in the age of people collecting newspapers. But this was a web comic. About two years in, the Teraport wars begin, and the stories begin getting bigger. Brandon Sanderson wrote the introduction for book 2, The Teraport Wars, and said, "This is the book where Schlock Mercenary figures out what it wants to be when it grows up."

[Accurate]

[Howard] It very much… This was not a thing that I did consciously. It certainly wasn't a thing I did expertly. But it was a thing I did. I had an existing audience, an existing brand, and I decided to take them from a quick episodic fast beats sort of story to a much larger form story. I got lucky in that I guess the audience was so small to begin with that when it grew, we didn't notice that we lost anybody. But this was definitely a case of something which at the time I began creating it was one thing, and at the time I finished it was very much something else. Even though you still have this blob character and mercenaries running through the core of it.

[Sandra] You had an assist from the fact that web comics are expected to evolve. So there is a genre expectation that there will be evolution which totally assisted in the redirect, which [garbled can be…]

[Howard] Yeah. That is the… That is what we called the low expectations of audiences watching amateurs.

[There's that. Anyway…]

[Howard] Good times. Wow. Are we really already 19 minutes in? What else can we say? I had a… We just need to can of worms this part. The whole career level can of worms of how do you rebrand yourself after spending 20 years as a cartoonist. Whatever I go do next, how do I keep the promises of my old brand…

[That's]

[Howard] Or break them in such a way…

[Another can of worms]

[Howard] I don't know.

[I think we just need to…]

[Howard] That's an old can of worms.

[Garbled]

[slap a lid on that, and say, whoops, can't cover it.]

[Howard] Whoops. Sorry. That's another eight part thing.

 

[Howard] Okay. We ready for homework?

[Homework. You are giving us the homework this time.]

[Howard] Okay, I am. In the first episode, I talked about how this intensive was expectations and promises, and how I didn't call it Eight Expectations because that would have forced me to drill down and to configure the content in such a way that there were eight discrete elements covered across seven episodes plus a… It was a headache. Your homework is to fulfill the promise that I decided not to make because I would have broken it. Call this intensive, call this discussion we've had over these last eight episodes, Eight Expectations. For you, for your toolbox, write down eight different categories in which promises and expectations can be used as structural elements, as troubleshooting elements, as critical elements, as career elements. Laying over all of the other tools that you use, that we all use, when we write, when we create. So there's your homework. Write the thing that I was either not smart enough or into much of a hurry to write, the course outline for Eight Expectations. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/01/09/17-2-it-was-a-promise-of-three-parts/

 

Key points: Sometimes the first line promises beautiful and evocative prose. Often pilots and prologues are violent or romantic, to show the range of what you can expect. Action, excitement, characters at their extreme. Try flipping to the middle! Use revisions to create consistency. Craft your promise and deliver on it. Use chapter beginnings as opportunities to write killer first lines. Watch for the dips when you're connecting the tent poles you are excited about. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 2]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, It Was a Promise of Three Parts.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

 

[Howard] The title of this episode comes to us paraphrasedly from the opening line of Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Which I'm going to go ahead and read in its entirety.

 

It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

 

This is beautiful and evocative prose. Among the many things that this first line does, it promises us a book in which there is going to be beautiful and evocative prose. Rothfuss's writing is delicious. It is… It's delicious. That's just a great word to lead with. When we talk about first lines, first scenes, first paragraphs, first pages, first chapters. Establishing shots. Overtures for a musical. Opening splash pages in a comic. All of these things make promises to the audience about what's going to follow. We need to make sure that we make those promises consciously. So let's talk a little bit about what some of those promises are. Meg, I think you had an example from Lower Decks that you wanted to…

[Megan] As a call back, when Howard was talking about the Lower Decks pilot, I brought this up in our notes as an example to really hammer home in this episode. Often, the pilot episode of a television series needs to show the full range of what you're going to experience within the show. So this means your pilot is often the most violent or it has the most romantic content. This is one of the reasons why, also branching over to books, you'll often have a prologue that's full of action and excitement for you to meet our main character. So, the specific cold open that Howard mentioned, when we first meet Boimler and Mariner initially put a lot of viewers off the show, because Mariner was so extremely Mariner and Boimler was so extremely Boimler. But in order to introduce these two characters, we had to see them at their most extremes to get an idea of what their dynamic would be like throughout the show. The final bit is that slice into Boimler's life at the very end of the cold open with… You can see the sinews and the tendons and the little fountain of blood to show that, oh, hey, other Star Trek shows are not going to have the kind of… I'm not going to say gore, but we're going to go a little bit further visually then your use to in a Star Trek. So that minute and a half had to show the full extremes of what the comedy, action, and characters would be like through the remainder of Lower Decks.

[Howard] Well, that first episode was, if memory serves, a splotchy Star Trek zombie comedy in which at the end of it, well, it's Star Trek, we found a medical cure and the zombies all got better.

[Uhuh]

[Howard] So…

[Ramsey met a guy, but… Giggles]

[Howard] Oh, yeah. I mean, there were a couple who were now nothing but ex-zombie excrement, but the… That slice in the opening promises us, to borrow the title from Brian McClellan's debut novel, it's a promise of blood…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And then the episode delivers that.

[Kaela] I like… For starters, you just explained to me pilots in a way that will make me kinder to pilots for the rest of my life.

[Me, too] [laughter]

[Kaela] I love it. But it brings to the fore, for me, how… Which is what we talked about last episode, genres are different, and mediums are different. Because in a book, you don't want to telegraph that much all upfront. You do need to telegraph some. You need to let people know this is what you are signing up for. However, in a book, some of this is what you can expect from this book is taken care of by the packaging of the book, the cover, the art, the back blurb, which will all talk about in a later episode in more detail. But we, as writers and creators, that first page, that first chapter, gets so much rewriting because you have to promise the right things.

 

[Megan] I had a friend once… Rachel, I'm going to say you by name…

[Laughter]

[Megan] Once, I gave her a copy of one of my favorite books. I actually think it may have been The Way of Kings. I'm like, "This is my very favorite book, and you will love it." She takes it from my hand and opens to the middle of the book and start reading. I actually yelled the word "Spoilers!"

[Chuckles]

[Megan] And I smacked it out of her hands.

[Laughter]

[Megan] She's like, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "What are you doing?" She says, "Well, I find the first chapter of books to be very overwrought because that's where the author spends most of their time." So she always reads a page of prose in the middle of a book, any book, to see if she likes the author's voice, and then she will start it from the beginning. Which I think is just… Makes sense…

[Wrong]

[Megan] It makes sense.

[Readers]

[Howard] No, that's fair. Because if you're reading a page from the middle of the book and… You read the opening, and you're like," Oh, wow, this looks good." Then you flip to the middle of the book. If I'd flipped to the middle of The Name of the Wind and it was suddenly super, super dry, low-end, workmen's prose… Sigh. Then the promise of the front of the book is not being kept in the middle, and I might not have read it.

[Sandra] Yeah, I know of a…

[Howard] The challenge for us… Sorry to keep going. The challenge for us is to make our first lines and are pages and paragraphs not overwrought, but wrought to the same extent as we are going to wreak… Wrought, wreak…

[I think it's wreak]

[Howard] Wring the rest of the book.

[Right]

 

[Sandra] Yeah. I once… I knew of an author who sold a three book deal after the first book was written and the other two were not, and sold it on the strength of the first two chapters, which then got completely edited out of existence.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] So, the thing that had hooked the editor, and the agent and everything, was wiped out. The whole series kind of just fell flat for everyone. Book 2 kept just like not being accepted and not being accepted and not being accepted. It was just, to me, case of that… Part of the problem was that those first chapters didn't actually match any of the other stuff. They were gorgeous and beautiful, and the rest was so much weaker in comparison. We don't want to do that either.

[Howard] Yeah. You don't try out for the long distance team by showing them how quickly you can run the 50 yard dash.

[Sandra] Right.

 

[Howard] Meg.

[Megan] In… Wait. No, I got it. Sorry. Reset. In video games, something that will happen, especially in very long story driven games, is you will start with a big action sequence, with a lot more abilities than your character will normally have later on in the game. So I'm thinking the opening of Ghost of Tsushima, the opening of the first Assassins Creed game, where you're playing a character at full strength. Then something happens that nerfs them back down to level I. It's a way to promise your audience that, "Hey, listen. Although you're going to start at a level I, can't do anything person, you will eventually work up to be this great grand thing." This is why shows like Star Wars or books like Eragon open with this big action sequence of a princess running from the villains with something very important that ends up in the hands of this farmboy. That happens in both of those. It's to promise the audience that, yeah, our protagonist is at the very beginning of their journey, but it inherently has this promise that eventually they will get to the level where they are participating in the story on this grand scale.

[Howard] I think one of the finest examples of this is the mission completion text of the first gun mission in Borderlands 2. The mission completion text is, "You just moved 5 feet and opened a locker. Later, when you're killing skyscraper-sized monsters with a gun that shoots lightning, you'll look back at this moment and be like, heh."

[Laughter]

[Howard] It's perfect. It's perfect because… Yeah, you're told what's coming.

 

[Howard] We need a book of the week. I have paged away from my outline. Who's got that?

[Kaela does]

[Kaela] That is me. Oh, uh… Wait.

[Yes. Yes, it is you.]

[Kaela] It is my book! So prepare yourself.

[I'm excited]

[Kaela] Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls is the book of the week. The reason why I suggested it for this episode is because, as I have been doing school visits and things like that, I read out like the first page and a halfish, the first page is actually half a page, anyway. So I read that out to the kids, and my favorite part is ending right after the main character, she's lost in the desert, ending right after she turns around, looks up, and she meets her first dark criatura. It is a woman who is half skeleton, traced by the moonlight, and is like known as the devourer. She's like, "Don't eat me." Is her thing, and I end right there. That's because, from the very beginning, I want people to know that even though that, yes, this is a middle grade adventure and it is… Like, we're starting out in an adventure. We're out in the desert, we're soaked in what the world is like, we have a very fearful main character because she's going to be throughout the book, and we're meeting very otherworldly, very frightening things. She is going to be in life-threatening situations very often. But also, they're cool, and the pros as well, I've found very important to bring in some of the descriptions, like the stripes of moonlight coming through her ribs, things like that. Where you know that going to be soaked into this world from the beginning. You're going to be meeting very ancient, very primordial creatures who are both dangerous but also quite unexpectedly kind as well. Because this criatura ends up taking her home. Even though she's known as the devourer.

[Cool]

[Howard] Thank you. So that's Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls. Cece is spelled c.e.c.e., for those of you who are thinking it's a carbon copy email to Rios.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] No. Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls by Kaela Rivera.

 

[Howard] Meg. You've got your hand up, and no one can see it except those of us with cameras.

[Megan] That's something, as you're creating, as you're writing, as you're drawing, whatever you're making. Check back in. What is the promise of the premise that you've set up? Are you still bringing the same level of fire and excitement to the remainder of your book as you do in that very beginning part that you've polished and framed?

[Howard] How do you avoid the problem of writing checks you can't cash in your first page? How do you avoid being so clever or so purple or so whatever that you just can't maintain it for a book?

[Sandra] Well, this is a problem we all have.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] I mean, like… It's… One of the things I think to make sure is while, yes, we do end up spending a lot of time on getting that beginning right, doing what Meg's friend did and flipping to the middle and seeing what does the middle feel like, and maybe when you see what the middle feels like, while we want to telegraph this book is going to be exciting and whatever, if your book is actually contemplative, trying to make it exciting in chapter 1 is setting a bad expectation. So if you have a contemplative, quiet book, then you do want a contemplative, quiet opening. Because lips us even though that feels like, oh, no, people won't get hooked, yes, they will. They will, because they ca… If they're a person who wants a contemplative book, and they pick up and see excitement, they're going to put the book down. So then you've suddenly created a mismatch between the reader and what you're delivering.

[Howard] Kaela.

[Kaela] Yeah. I think this is particularly achieved through revisions. Like, no matter what media you are doing, whether you're doing books, video games, whether you're making a show, you need to do revisions. It's inevitable. Because that's how you get consistency. I think consistency is absolutely key to this. Both crafting the right promise and delivering on that promise. Because, for example, both pacing and tonally wise, a previous book of mine that is not published and will need major revisions, like, the first third of the book was this very slice of life experience, and it was contemplative and soft and painful and hard and beautiful. Then, the last two thirds are this life or death video game tournament, where you're like, "Go, go, go, go!" Even though I liked both of these things, it did not mesh into the same book properly.

[Howard] You have written two very cool books.

[Kaela] Yeah.

[Howard] Or at least parts of two very cool books.

[Kaela] And they're both unfinished. Yeah.

[Howard] Yep.

[Kaela] So…

 

[Howard] One of the tools that I use is treating chapter beginning as another opportunity to write a killer first-line. I'll review my first-line and I'll ask myself, okay, was it awesome because it planted a hook, was it awesome because it was pithy, was it awesome because it described something in a new way? Do I do that again, or do I do what the first-line didn't do, and do something else in order to show that this chapter still has a powerful first-line, but contains a continuation of the story in an expanding sort of way? But always treating… Always treating the page turn to a new chapter as an opportunity to overwrought again.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] Yeah. One of the tools that I really find very powerful is finding the voice of your book. This is a thing that newer writers are sometimes very, very confused by, because voices this amalgamation a lot of word choice and tone shift and character voice and all of these things. But when you… Like… When you find the voice for the book as a whole, you can then go back to your beginning and make sure that the voice is matching. Again, it's flip to the middle and make your beginning promise accurately what the middle is delivering.

[Howard] Flip to the middle, but be standing more than an arm's length away from Meg…

[Yes. Laughter. Garbled.]

[Megan] Something else is when you are working on a creative… We all start with an idea. Be that one scene we love, one character we love. Something you need to watch out for is you set your tent poles of the scenes you're really excited for, and the dips come when you're like, ugh, I have to connect these, but it's so boring to get from A to B. You may either need to take out a tentpole or put something more interesting in the canvas of your connectivity.

[Howard] Yep. One of the things that I found working on the illustrations for Extreme Dungeon Mastery version 2, and I knew this going into it. I've got about a couple of hundred pictures to draw, and I knew that my style and my technique and my stamina was going to change on the way through. I was going to get better at what I was doing, and I was going to get tired of doing it. That was going to change things. One of the ways I tackled that was by drawing some of the last pictures first and revisiting some of the first pictures later, and doing a little bit of revision.

 

[Howard] We are approaching a 20 minute episode of a 15 minute podcast. So, I think it's time for homework. I've got our homework. You ready for this? Write six different first lines. For your work in progress or for a work in progress that you're imagining maybe sometime someday doing. Or maybe for six different works in progress. Six different first lines. But each of them should make a promise that you personally don't think you can keep. Now ask yourself why you don't think you can keep it, and how you would change the first-line to be something that you can do. There you go. This has been Writing Excuses. Thank you for listening to us. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/12/19/16-51-promises-are-a-structure/

 

Key points: Promises and expectations. A structural layer. A troubleshooting tool. Audience expectations are what they bring with them. Promises are what you make, which set the audience expectation for what is coming. Be aware that audiences have a head full of stuff that you have no control over. This interacts with audience bias and diversity. The bookshelf genre vs. the elemental genre. Set the expectation, deliver on it, and make it delightful. Deliver more than the reader expects! 

 

[Transcriptionist note: I may have mislabeled one or more of the speakers.]

[Season 16, Episode 51]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Promises are a Structure.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

 

[Howard] I'm so excited to have three brand-new to you guests, guest hosts, here with us on Writing Excuses. We're going to go ahead and start by letting them introduce themselves. Kaela. Take it away.

[Kaela] Hi, everybody. I'm Kaela Rivera. I am the author of CeCe Rios and the Desert of Souls, a middle grade Latinx fantasy about a girl who becomes a bruja in order to rescue her kidnapped sister. It also just last month, or recently, has won the Charlotte Huck Award for 2022, so that was really exciting.

[Howard] Outstanding. Now, you say just last month and then you say recently. You realize this airs… This episode is going to do something that very few of our episodes ever do. It's going to air the day after we record it.

[Kaela] Well, then, I'll stick with a month ago.

[Laughter]

 

[Howard] Fantastic. Congratulations. Sandra?

[Sandra] Hi. I'm Sandra Tayler. I'm a writer of speculative fiction, picture books, and blog entries. My most recently published books are Strength of Wild Horses and Hold onto Your Horses, which are a pair of picture books. But I also write short stories which I post to my Patreon, and you can find it over at patreon/Sandra Taylor. I'm also the Sandra of which Howard sometimes mentions at various times on Writing Excuses. Because we share a house and some children and a business.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And Sandra is understating a little bit her latest books. Every time a Schlock Mercenary book comes out, it has seen the editorial hand of Sandra in all of the content and the layout hand of Sandra Tayler in everything. And Sandra's done a bunch of writing for the new Extreme Dungeon Mastery book that's coming out.

[Sandra] This is true.

[Howard] So, lots of stuff. I sometimes have to remind Sandra how awesome she is.

[Sandra] I was trying to be brief.

[Laughter]

 

[Howard] Brief is fine. Brief is fine, but… Okay. Meg. Megan. Meg.

[Megan] Hi, everyone. I really just have one name, but it just sounds weird when you pair it with my last name, so… My name is Megan Lloyd. I am a storyboard artist and screenwriter working in the animation industry out in Los Angeles. I've storyboarded on a number of really cool shows. Some of my favorites that have released recently are Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous and Star Trek: Lower Decks. On top of my work as a board artist, I also write and also do development art for projects early on in the can, let's say.

[Howard] So… You… Early on… And on is one of those anywhere a cat can go prepositions. Another anywhere a cat can go prepositions is under is in under nondisclosure.

[Megan] Yes. That's the one.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I mention cat because for those of you not benefiting from the visual video feed, which is pretty much everybody except the four of us, Meg has a cat perched on the back of her chair, which is kind of amazing.

[Megan] Isn't he horrible?

[Howard] [garbled I didn't know you could] get cats to do that.

 

[Howard] All right.

[Very cute]

[Howard] Promises are a structure. For the next eight episodes, we are going to talk about promises and expectations as a structural layer, as a troubleshooting tool, is a way in which you can look at what you're working on and determine whether or not you're correctly setting expectations, whether you're making promises that you plan to keep, whether you're… What's the jargon? Writing checks that are going to bounce? I was tempted, because this is an eight episode intensive, I was tempted to call it (sunglasses) Eight Expectations.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Explosion.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But then I would have to enumerate this, break it into eight discrete parts. Because eight expectations is making a promise that I'm not actually prepared to keep.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] This is a little more fluid than that. I do want to layout something, though, that promises and expectations are not truly interchangeable terms. In marketing, audience expectations are things that you set, or that you need to be aware of when you are doing your marketing. They… An audience will bring their expectations with them, before anything has happened. When we talk about promises, usually that's because something you have said or done or written or put on the cover or whatever has made some sort of a promise to the reader, has set their expectations for something which is coming. I also want to point out that audience bias is huge here. Now, I've just done a lot of talking.

[Sandra] Well, I…

[Howard] I'm going to throw this one of to our… Sandra, go ahead.

[Sandra] Yeah. I was just going to say that last piece that you mentioned is a huge piece, because anytime you create a thing, audience is going to arrive at the thing with a head full of stuff that you have no control over. So one of the most important things to, as you are setting expectations, it is important to have a feel for kind of the Zeitgeist and kind of societal… If you placed your book as a fantasy novel, then the world at large is going to have a set of stuff in their head that they think fits fantasy novel and if yours doesn't fit, then you have to adjust their expectations for what you mean. So it becomes a… Expectations is always a conversation with audience. Sometimes it's a conversation that is like a message in space where you package it all up and then send it out and wait a minute and a half to get their response and you hope that you packaged it well. Other times, it's much more conversational, where you can actually adjust on the fly. But… Yeah.

[Kaela] I would agree with that. I'd also say that there's an interesting way that this interacts with, like, say, diversity in literature. When people come in, they don't have any expectations, or they have very unfortunate expectations, or they have such an unfamiliarity with the subject matter that they expect to be taught everything, versus, like, for example, writing Cece, which is… It's a complete alternate fantasy world, but it is set in… Inspired by the setting of Mexico in the 1920s to 30s, which is a very unfamiliar place and time for most people. So there was a lot of difficulties in getting… Initially, getting people to be willing to take that adventure on a fantasy in that kind of a space versus a medieval English sort of [sci?] fantasy. Because, again, you can't write everything for everybody's expectations, either…

[Sandra] No. I love that you bring up the diversity angle, because this is actually… And I'm sure you actually have more personal experience than I do, but a lot of times, publishing expectations for what we are looking for mean that some of the more diverse and alternate viewpoint novels get bounced because they don't meet publishing expectations. That is actually a lot of what the conversation about let's broaden what we're offering is making more space for people to read works in which they are not centered, and learn how to engage with works that ask them to stretch a little bit.

[Howard] Let me point out here that during the next eight episodes, we're going to talk about how genre, the genre you're working in… And that can be what we call the bookshelf genre, which is where the publisher has put your book, or the elemental genre, which is what you think you're really writing to. How those make promises and set audience expectations. As well as what kind of prose you use. What kind of cover art shows up? How weird it would be to have, say, a paranormal romance that doesn't have a magical looking female on the cover anywhere. That would just be odd. The promises made by foreshadowing. The promises made, and then broken, by red herrings. These are all things that we're going to cover.

 

[Howard] What I'd like to talk about now is are there some good examples of things that you've consumed, and it can be books, it can be media, it can be anything. Good examples of something that made a promise and then kept it for you in a way that was wonderful.

[Sandra] Oh. There's so many. It's like… But… You asked that question and, of course, my brain goes completely blank. Even though I've had time to study before. Right now, currently airing is Hawkeye on Disney Plus. They've got one episode left, and it feels like they're going to land it. Like, all the way through, it's been kind of predictable for me in a delightful way. It's like, "Oh, this is going to happen next," and then it does. It makes me happy every time, because they set an expectation and then they delivered it and they made me laugh a little bit. So right now for me, Hawkeye is living in this sweet spot of being exactly what I'm expecting and yet not being boring for it. So I'm really enjoying that one.

[Howard] What about you, Meg?

[Megan] I'm going to plug the Netflix animated series Arcane. Which, the expectation is, "Wow, this art style is beautiful. Will it look like this all the way through?" Yes, it does. Not only that, but they're telling a very compelling and emotional story, that, like Sandra said, sometimes you can see what's coming only because of how they've set it up, but it's a very satisfying show to watch. Especially from a character development standpoint. And also visually beautiful.

[Yep]

[Howard] I wanted to bring up, just very briefly, Star Trek: Lower Decks because that opening scene of the first episode where they're… He's trying to record a Captains Log and then we find out he's not actually a captain, he's… So this expectation has been set that were going to take Star Trek tropes and we're going to turn them on their head. Then she's pulling things out of a box, and you realize, "Oh, it's going to throw all the Star Trek nerdery at us as well. All the trivia." Then, she accidentally slices deep into his leg with the bat'leth and we roll credits. We realize, "Oh, this is going to do some ridiculous things." So, yeah, Lower Decks has been great.

 

[Howard] Before we move any further, though, I want to plug, or one of us should plug the book of the week. Who's got that?

[Kaela] I do. I'm excited. So I chose for the book of the week The Monster at the End of This Book. Which is an old… Back from my child, little golden book, Sesame Street book with Grover the monster. I love it for talking about expectations because it's right there in the title. You are promised, in the title, that there is going to be a monster at the end of this book. Then the entire book is about Grover being scared that there's going to be a monster coming at the end of the book. Then, when you turn to the last page, Grover discovers that the monster at the end of the book is him, because he is a monster.

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] It is all safe, and adorable. Throughout the whole book, it's very interactive with a child because, "Oh, don't turn the page! Don't turn the page, you'll get us closer to the monster." But I really love it because it totally sets up an expectation, and then walks you through. Then, right at the end, twists it to make the monster safe. It's a delightful, joy-filled romp. So, if you are unfamiliar with this book, I highly recommend you go check it out and pick it up. Because it is a true classic.

[Howard] I love the illustrations where Grover has built this barrier. Now you can't turn the page. I've bricked it up. You turn the page, and the next page is covered in brick rubble. Because you smashed through the wall that Grover made.

 

[Howard] I want to take a moment now to talk about some apexes. Exemplars and failures and the apex… What I've been told is apex middle ground. Have any of you seen Million Dollar Baby?

[No. Chuckles… I… Yeah, makes sense. Chuckles… I have not. I was young when it came out, and therefore not encouraged to go to the theater to see this movie. Mostly because of, I think what you're going to talk about, the unexpected twist in the middle that completely changes the expectation of I thought this was going to be a fun sports movie.]

[Howard] Yeah. It's… Here's what's fun about it, and why it's… It's an apex example of this middle ground. It has 90% positive critical reviews and 90% positive audience reviews across thousands of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Which is kind of weird, because when the movie came out, all I remember hearing was audience noise about "Hey, you promised me a sports movie and then you gave me something that was actually about euthanasia." That's not young people in the far east, that's euthanasia all one word. Very deep. Very, very dark. But. What it did, it did brilliantly. My… I'm sorry, Rumba, I don't know if you can hear the beep, but Rumba is behind me saying something about "I'm charged. I need attention."

[It just wants to be included]

[Howard] "The floor is dirty. Please let me eat." I don't know what Rumba wants.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] My best example of an apex failure is the Tropicana Pure Premium art. Where, in January of 09, they replaced the orange with a straw stuck in it with a glass with orange juice in it. They paid like $30 million to an ad agency, to a marketing firm, to create this. They… Their sales dropped 20%, they replaced the old artwork a month later, and the whole debacle cost them well over $50 million. Apex exemplars? Do we have another apex exemplar? We need to wrap this up and begin talking about some of the specifics that we can be doing for making promises in our next episode. So, who's got an apex exemplar for us?

[Kaela] I have an example. So, I think that the Lunar Chronicles actually does a great job of this. I know I've talked with people about when you're really excited about the kind of idea that someone's pitching you, but they don't really lead into it and the story kind of swerves off. That's really easy to do in a series as well, because you have multiple entries into this gargantuan story. But, the Lunar Chronicles, at least for me, did an excellent job of what it set out to do. I mean, it was like, "Hey, we're going to do fairytales. But it's in a futuristic sci-fi setting. How about that?" I was like, "I'm down. I want to hear more. Cinderella as a cyborg? Keep talking." With each story, it does that. Where you get a really strong first entry, and it's… It also creates… It culminates across the book into an overall very satisfying rebellion story where you can actually buy that the rebellion has happened and that it will work and how each main character does this. I love how it delivers even more than you expect. Like, you get… The second entry in the series, which is about… It's a retelling of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, right? But by the end of the series, they have done that story so it's also Beauty and the Beast. You're like, "Oh, my goodness! It's also Beauty and the Beast." [Garbled] Then, Rapunzel being… Rapunzel being… There's no tower that makes sense in a sci-fi setting. She's stuck in a satellite. You're like, "Oh, my goodness. That makes so much sense." You get all of the isolation, all of the same issues. But it makes so much sense in its setting. Each person adds up across the series to a really satisfying closure. The Snow White makes sense because, from the beginning, there's the evil queen already, that you know about from all books. Then you find out, like, near the end, you're like, "Oh, wait a second," before you get to that last book, you find out, she has a stepdaughter. You're like, "Oh. Is it going to be Snow White?" Then you open the last book and it is. It's just such a great delivery on…

[Howard] That's awesome.

[Kaela] Everything that you were hoping for.

 

[Howard] That's awesome. Okay. Well, we are out of time, and I have your homework. So. Consider your newest favorite thing. It can be a restaurant, a film, a TV series, a novel, web comic, computer game, whatever. Ask yourself what promises this thing made to you. What expectations were set for you for this thing? Now… Write this down. Then ask yourself why you believed these promises would be kept and how they were or were not kept. So there's your homework. We're going to have seven more episodes about promises and expectations. We hope you're here for all seven. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/10/18/15-42-writing-the-end/

 

Key Points: How do you pick the right kind of climax? Your beginning, the first act, telegraphs the ending. How do you pick the right one for the story? Identify what kind of story fulfills the character's journey. Write backwards, plan the ending and let that determine the rest of the story. The ending defines the story. Start with who are the characters when we leave them, then rewind to figure out what leads them there. You need to know what you're making to figure out the ingredients. How can the characters fail and still satisfy the audience? Give them hope. It should be satisfying, but still a train wreck. Build up to it. Fulfill the promises, and still surprise them. Don't change your ending just because someone guessed it. Satisfying does not necessarily mean happy.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 42.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing The End.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And we're done.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[Brandon] I don't usually get to do that joke.

 

[Brandon] We're going to talk about writing endings. We have questions from listeners, and a couple of them are really curious about how we pick what kind of ending we do. So, the first question is, how do you decide what kind of climax fits your story? They list battle, escape, conversation, inner turmoil, etc. All of those together sounds like a great idea.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Well, the… There's a school of thought that says your… Whatever your first line, your first paragraph, your first chapter, that will tell you in some sense what your ending will be. That will telegraph the whole story. That works much better for short things than for long things. But, by the end of the first act, you should know what kind of an ending… Whether this is going to end in a gunfight or a conversation.

[Brandon] Yeah, I agree. Now, if you're a heavy duty discovery writer, you may not discover that till the end, and then you need to rewrite it in. That's totally fine. But let's just say in the finished product, the reader should be able to anticipate what kind of ending it is… You are looking for after the first act of your story is done. Most of the time. That said, sometimes you do get twists, like, Into the Woods by Sondheim is a classic example of sometimes reversing expectations. It's very hard to do. But it's very rewarding if you do it right.

[Dan] I'm not sure that we're answering this specific person's question. Because they said, here's my list of things, a battle, a chase, a conversation. If I know that my book has to end with the hero defeating the villain, that could take the form of a battle, that could take the form of a chase, that could take the form of various different kinds of violence or action. How do you pick which one of those is going to be best for this particular story?

[Brandon] I like your reframing it that way. Because we're taking the easy answer to this…

[Yeah]

[Brandon] I think the harder answer, because… Looking at something like MCU films. One of my favorites is Doctor Strange. I know a lot of people think it's one of the weakest, but I love it, because magic and wizards. The ending of that one is basically a conversation.

[Dan] Yeah. And it's a very clever one. It is a puzzle, and especially coming on the heels of so many where, so many Marvel movies all ended with we're all over a city and the city is blowing up and we're flying around and shooting each other, that one ended with a conversation and a puzzle.

[Brandon] And you totally could have ended that one with a fight instead, and it would have felt appropriate for the themes that were happening through the story.

[Howard] Let's look at that ending a little bit. There is a whole bunch of very satisfying fight leading up to that ending. That ending is the capstone to the fight, the capstone to all of this action there at the end. To me, that's what made it satisfying. If he had arrived and immediately gone and had his chat with Dormammu, I wouldn't have felt satisfied.

[Brandon] That's true.

[Howard] I wouldn't have seen all the fun magic stuff I wanted to see.

[Brandon] Although, I will say, part of the reason I like that ending is it was a theme for the character, learning patience…

[Right]

[Brandon] We had seen that his trouble was he wanted it now, he wanted to be the best, and he wanted his answers. If you haven't seen the movie, he travels to get healed from a terrible injury so he can go back to being a doctor. He finds people who will help him, and they turn him aside. They send him out. He's like, "No, no, no. You've got to help me." But he has to learn to be patient with his flaws and with himself to find inner peace. Then he uses that to defeat the enemy.

[Dan] Now, to Howard's point, a lot of what's going on in the early action stuff is try-fail cycles. I think we can win by this. No we can't. I think we can win by this. No we can't. Then he puts the pieces together and completes his own inner arc, and that's when he figures out how to do it.

[Howard] I think that comes back to the original question. Am I going to end with a battle? Am I going to end with a chase? Am I going to end with a conversation? Well, Brandon's first answer was, these all sound nice.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You can have all of those. You can have, in the final six minutes of act three, you can have a battle that… Or, excuse me, a chase… Well, a battle that fails and someone gets away and you have to chase them and you catch them and you have a conversation, and then we're done.

[Brandon] I think the key here is for you to identify what kind of story will fulfill, not necessarily what you need to do, but will fulfill the character's journey. Then you could pick any one of these things. Whatever feels right at the time. As long as you are completing that character's journey. That's the harder decision.

 

[Victoria] So, I feel like I'm the monster at the end of this conversation.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Right? Like, the thing is, I have been waiting to talk until the end of this because I write my books backwards. So I actually don't do anything until I've planned the ending. The ending, for me, and that climax basically through the last page, determines the entire story I'm telling. So, for me, the total cohesion of it is second to figuring out the ending of the story. So I feel like I have perhaps a different perspective on this, because rather than write toward the end, and think what kind of resolution do I need in order to fulfill the promises that I've made early on, I write backwards, from the end to make those promises from the ending that I know I want to achieve.

[Dan] So, you are still then at a point in the process deciding how your ending is going to work. I actually write the same way. I think about the ending first. So, how do you pick?

[Victoria] It's the story I want to tell. I feel like the ending is not a culmination, it's the definition. For me, the ending is the punctuation at the end, it's the thing that we're working toward. An entire sentence has to end at that moment. I… It is part of the fundamental questions I am asking myself when I begin to have an idea and when I begin to ask what kind of story I'm telling. I really treat the ending is the opportunity for the absolute collision of all of the ideas that I have, of all of the places that I want to end. The thing that I actually ask myself, before I figure out if it's a battle or a chase or anything, is who are my characters at the moment we leave them? So, really, it comes down to who's alive, who's dead, where are they act physically and psychologically, and then, from there, I begin to rewind their last moments in order to figure out what is the thing that leads them there, and I rewind from there all the way until I get to the beginning and figure out who the characters are when we first meet them.

[Howard] Your Doctor Strange metaphor is feeling even more fitting now.

[Victoria] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The bit about working backwards from the ending, it does not feel backwards to me. When I'm outlining, these days all of my discovery writing tricks are now rolled into my outlining process. The… I've talked about the process where my first outline is a 10-year-old boy tells you about his favorite movie at high speed. The 10-year-old boy will say, "Ohohoh, I forgot to tell you this one thing." That actually goes into my first pass at the outline, because it's silly and it's fun. But I begin that process thinking, "What is the big awesome moment at the end that got the 10-year-old boy to come home and tell me, 'Oh, I have to tell you about this movie, it's so great!'"

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Howard] "Because there was this thing. But before I tell you about the end…" And then off we go.

[Victoria] Also, I have used, I feel like over the course of the episodes that I've been here, a lot of food metaphors. But to use yet another food metaphor, it's like the ingredients, like, you're gathering apples along the way, and you end up with an apple pie or something. I don't want to end up with, like, an orange cake. Like, if I grew… Like, I don't want to, like… If you write towards a discovery and you don't actually have a plan in mind, you risk gathering ingredients which result in a different end, which result in something that doesn't feel cohesive. Whereas I want to know what it is I'm making, so that I can figure out the ingredients that I need to find along the way to make that dish. It is all about that dish.

[Howard] If you're gathering apples, it is entirely possible to end up with cyanide.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because there's cyanide in apple seeds.

[Victoria] Okay. Different fruit, then.

[Howard] But that's… No no no, but your metaphor works perfectly, because you can gather apples, you can be gathering these things, and still have some options for what happens at the end. That's, for me, where surprising but inevitable will come in.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop and talk about your book.

[Howard] Oh, yes.

[Victoria] Yeah. I have a new book out. Or I will, by the time this airs. It is called The Invisible Life of Addie Larue. It is essentially about a young woman in 18th-century France who is deathly afraid of dying in the same place she was born. She decides to summon the old gods to help her out of her life, out of her predicament.

[Brandon] As one does.

[Victoria] As one does. As one does. But the problem is, none of them answer. She prays that Dawn, and no one answers. She prays at midday, and no one answers. She prays at dusk, and no one answers. The one rule she has been taught all her life, never pray to the gods that answer after dark. She makes a mistake, and she does this, and she accidentally summons the devil. When he asks her what she would be willing to trade for her soul, she wants time. She doesn't know how much, she wants to live forever, and the devil says, "No." Because if you live forever, he doesn't get your soul, he gets the soul at the conclusion of the deal. So, in a moment of desperation, she says to the devil, "You can have my soul when I don't want it anymore." Sensing an opportunity, the devil agrees. The deal is done, and she discovers afterward that he has granted her the ability to live forever and cursed her to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

[Brandon] There you go.

[Victoria] I did not start writing it until… I had the idea eight years ago, and I didn't start writing it until two years ago when I figured out the ending.

[Brandon] What an awesome premise.

[Howard] And is this under the name…

[Victoria] V. E. Schwab.

[Howard] V. E. Schwab. The Invisible Life of Addie Larue.

 

[Brandon] All right. So. Another question we had… Kind of take this from a different direction, is, how can you end a climax without neatly resolving the conflicts, or, also, how can you have your characters fail without leaving the audience disappointed? How can you build up all this tension, and build up all these indications that there's going to be a heroic victory, and then… Not. Give. It. To. Them?

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Well, in YA, you would say you would need to have hope. So you can end with a bad ending or a failure in YA, but the thing that you don't want to end up with is the lack of hope. I'm also a really big believer in saving the day, but not the world. I love it when your characters survive to fight again, maybe solve one of the problems, but in so doing, much like the try-fail cycle, end up creating another problem that they're going to have to face at some point down the line.

[Dan] Yeah. Unsatisfying endings are like my favorite thing.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Unsatisfying is the wrong word, because if you do it right, it will still feel satisfying and it will still feel resolved, even though you didn't get what you want. So, in all of my John Cleaver novels, except, arguably, the very last one, he does what he's trying to do. He fills the goal he sets out to fill, and then looks around at the wreckage surrounding him and goes, "Oh, my gosh. What was the cost of actually destroying this demon? I've lost my family, I lost everything that I had." And I just over and over for five books because I'm an awful person.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] The ending of Extreme Makeover does this same thing. It has an incredibly dark, desolate ending that a lot of people come back to me and they're like, "How… Why did you do that?" Because that's where it needed to end. That is actually the resolution of the arc that I set up, is that these characters are going to fail in the world is going to end.

[Brandon] It's why everyone on Seinfeld should end up in jail…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] At the end of the series. That is the satisfying resolution, under some understandings of how the plots were going.

[Dan] Okay. So. Taking Extreme Makeover as an example, all of my early readers, all of the offer readers, the writing group that I ran it through, they all came back and said, "What? How dare you end it there? We thought they were going to pull it out." I realized, okay, this is satisfying to me, but I need to make it satisfying to the audience. So, I played a lot of tricks on you. First of all, I started every chapter, and this came very late in the revision process, started every chapter with a countdown to the end of the world. So that you know, even if you think that I'm going to cheat at the end and pull it out, you at least have been told, every couple of pages, nope, the end of the world is coming.

[Brandon] That worked really well. What it did was it made the end of the world become a thing you're anticipating, and kind of looking forward to.

[Dan] Yes. Then, the other thing was, I kind of amped up the darkness inside of all the characters, so that when it happens, you're like, "Oh, good. That one just got his comeuppance." Then, "Oh, good, that one just got it." We get to the end and you realize, like, the worst thing that any character does in that book, in my opinion, happens in one of the last couple of pages. If you actually look at the dates and the times of this countdown, it's not counting down to the end of the book, it's counting down to that one betrayal. So, by the time you get there, you're like, "Well, yeah, he deserves to die. I've been following this whole time, I've been waiting for him to pull it out, he just did this awful thing to her, I want him to die."

 

[Victoria] This comes back, again and again, to promises. Right? To promise versus expectation, to finding a way to surprise people even when they know what they want. Because that's essentially the bargain that you're trying to strike here, is, a reader reads and, if you have a cohesive narrative, they have an idea of how they expect it to end and how they want it to end. You, somehow, have to find ways to surprise them, and not be predictable, while still fulfilling the general promise. You made a tonal promise over the course of your book. So, then, they can't be betrayed by the tone. They can't be betrayed by the ending. So there's like… It's a lot of promises to keep up with. You're going to end up with somebody upset. Like, no matter how well you end a book, somebody is going to wish you ended it differently. That's one of the hard parts of this.

[Howard] The one counsel I'd give is that if you have a public audience for a series, and you have not yet published the ending of the series, don't let the fact that someone correctly guessed the ending of a thing make you change the ending. I was on a panel with a guy who wrote for comic books. He would go through the letters and if somebody guessed his ending, he would just change it. I thought, "That is no way to live."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I assume that somebody is going to put all these things together, even if they're just rolling dice, and figure out what I had planned. That person gets to do a little dance…

[Victoria] [garbled… They get a cookie]

[Howard] And know that they are smarter than me, and that's fine.

 

[Brandon] Going back to some of the things that Dan and Victoria were saying, I think satisfying doesn't have to mean happy. If you can learn to split apart those two things… George Martin made a career on being satisfying but not happy in his epic fantasy. That is what people came to expect. That… Being satisfying… Even satisfying deaths is like a thing in the Game of Thrones series, that if you don't fulfill on, reader expectations are like, "Wait a minute. This is not what I was promised. I was looking forward to satisfying deaths."

[Dan] You can see that in the final season of the TV show.

[Victoria] We can't… I can't even talk about it, I'm so angry.

[Dan] So many people…

[Victoria] I'm still angry.

[Dan] Started to complain about halfway through the season, "Wait. All of the main characters are going to live through this!" That is not what they had been promised, years and years ago when that first book started. Then the show kind of flinched and stopped killing off main characters. It didn't satisfy.

[Victoria] That is a tonal promise break. You promised not only death, but satisfying death that adequately reflected the crimes which were perpetuated in life. It is one of the only things we all had to look forward to…

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] I am still upset about it.

 

[Brandon] Moving on. Let's go ahead and do some homework. Dan, you have our homework.

[Dan] Yeah. So what we want you to do is just practice this. Take something you've already written, whether it is a short story, a novel, or whatever length. Then, rewrite your ending so that the opposite thing happens. This is not just let a meteor land and kill all of your heroes before they succeed. Find away that they can fail, but that it's satisfying. Whether you do this the opposite kind of tone or the opposite kind of… The opposite person wins. However you want to define opposite. Write it, but do your best to make it feel satisfying.

[Brandon] I'm really curious to try this on some of my own stories. I think it would be… This is going to be a fun exercise to practice kind of pantsing an ending, where you're taking all the things you've set up, and then coming up with a new ending. Very hard for someone like you or me who always knows our endings.

[Victoria] I was going to say… You've gathered all your ingredients for apple pie, and now…

[Dan] Now I'm telling you to make orange juice.

[Victoria] You have to go and bake something completely different with it?

[Howard] I've already told you, there's cyanide in there.

[Victoria] I know, I know. [Garbled] poison.

[Howard] You've got this.

[Brandon] You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/08/26/13-34-qa-on-character-arcs/

 

Q&A Summary: 

Q: How do you fulfill your promises about a character arc without being cliché?

Q: How do you subvert a common character arc without it feeling like betraying a promise to a reader? 

A: How do you give them what they want without just being obvious about it? Use the predictability test: If at the beginning of the story you can predict the resolution, there's something wrong. BUT some stories, readers, genres or subgenres, fulfilling expectations is the right thing to do. Name that tune, or sing along? Make sure the promise can be fulfilled in multiple ways, then pick a surprising one that is more fulfilling. Have the character wanting at least two things, and then give them at least one. Make the character original, unique, and their reaction will also be original and unique.

Q: Do you need to complete each character arc in the story? For a character in a series, should each book contain a complete character arc, or should the entire series cover one large arc? How do you tie multiple character arcs together when you're writing the first book of a trilogy? With lots of character arcs, how do you interweave them?

A: If all the character arcs follow the same shape, that can feel artificial. However, if the arcs are staggered so that one person has a completely unresolved crisis at the end of the story, that may feel unsatisfying. Look for plateaus, stopping points along the arc, for individual characters.

Q: What separates an iconic character from a caricature? Or a stereotype?

A: Make the character unique. Caricatures are exaggerated and one-sided, while iconic characters don't change from episode to episode. Separate iconic, not changing, from archetype. If a similar iconic character from another series can replace your iconic character, you may have a caricature.

Q: Have you ever had an iconic character, upon further exploration, become a character in need of an arc? How would you make that transition?

A: Comics are often forced to reboot because they are trying to do this. However, books often take iconic characters from one book and put them in a second book where they have an arc.

Q: How do you continue a character's story after they've completed their original arc?

A: Think about your parents' roles in your story. Put the character and what they've learned in a new situation. Make sure your character has enough depth and layers.

Q: How much does a character need to change in their arc? Does it always have to be a major, permanent, life-redefining change?

A: It needs to be enough to see a difference. Satisfy the reader that a change has occurred. Set up the right conflict and make the right promise. Some change, some growth, even if they're not perfect at the end.

 

[Brandon] All right. We are out of time. Thank you guys so much for sending in your questions. These have been great questions. Dan has a writing prompt.

[Dan] Yes, I do.

[Brandon] Did you forget?

[Dan] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I warned you ahead of time.

[Dan] I know, I know. I don't have a writing prompt.

[Brandon] Howard? Do you have a writing prompt?

[Howard] I did at the beginning of the episode, but then Dan assured us that he…

[Dan] I assured no one. I merely said okay.

[Howard] You said, "I'll have this by the end. I'm on this."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I felt very reassured.

[Dan] Dear listener. We actually before recording this talked about how we use to blindside our guests with writing prompts. So, Brandon is taking great delight in now doing it to us.

[Brandon] [inaudible]

[Dan] Even though it's not even technically blindsiding, because he told me. I want you to write, dear listener, a story in which Brandon asks someone for a writing prompt, and that person is unprepared, and Brandon receives great karmic justice.

[Laughter]

[Valynne] Ouch. Pretty savage there.

[Brandon] All right. I guess I'll…

[Howard] Alternatively…

[Dan] I didn't say which side of karma Brandon was on.

[Howard] Alternatively, do an image search on mountains. Trace a mountain onto a piece of paper. Now make that outline the arc for your character.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. I hope we didn't give you any excuses. Now go write.